Having all now served their time in relation to their Swedish convictions for copyright crimes, the co-founders and early funder of The Pirate Bay will not face any further punishment in Belgium, after a separate criminal case in relation to the always controversial file-sharing site fell apart.

According to Torrentfreak, former Pirate Bay overseers Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, and Peter Sunde, and their money man Carl Lundström, all faced new criminal charges in Belgium in relation to their involvement with the file-sharing platform, mirroring the charges they faced in the 2009 case in the Swedish courts.

But the new criminal case against them focused on copyright infringement enabled by the Bay between September 2011 and November 2013, which was long after the four men had cut their ties with the file-sharing operation. Which means that even if the Belgian courts did hold the four men liable for the copyright infringement the Bay facilitated back in the day (which the Swedish courts did), they could not be held responsible for the piracy at the heart of this case.

And while it would normally encourage criminal action being taken against piracy operations, in this case the Belgian Entertainment Association admitted to local media that “technically speaking, we agree with the court” regarding the liabilities of Svartholm, Neij, Sunde and Lundström in this case.

The latest development in TPB shenanigans follows confirmation last week that the Pirate Bay Four are yet to pay a penny of the damages they were ordered to provide to music and movie firms as a result of the aforementioned Swedish trial, which was a combined civil and criminal hearing. According to Swedish media, the figure owed – originally 30 million Swedish crowns – has now almost doubled because of interest and late payment fines.

The only one of the four men who was ever in a position to make any damages payments was Lundström, though he declared himself bankrupt in 2013, after possibly signing over assets to his wife, it is thought.

Right, so I suppose you want to know what the most-read news story on the CMU website was in June 2015. If not, this page really isn’t the place for you. It’s OK, it’s an easy mistake to make. Just click to go somewhere else on the site, I won’t tell anyone. Although maybe I’ve piqued your interest. Would you like to know after all? Alright then, it was a report on the sacking of DJ Slugo as music supervisor on the new Spike Lee film, after it emerged that he was trying to get musicians to pay to submit their music for possible inclusion.

After that there was all the Apple Music-related stuff you might expect – three reports in all – that being the month’s big story. But there was plenty of other digital music news, not all of it quite so hype-heavy. Second most popular on the site in June was the ongoing fight to take a clone of Grooveshark offline, after the original site was shut down in May. Then there was news of Blinkbox Music going into administration, after new owner Guvera struggled to come up with a financially viable plan for it.

And because people are still interested in analogue music too, in at number eight is a look at HMV’s claim that it is responsible for the vinyl revival and is now taking the format mainstream again. Those twelve-inch Mothers’ Day compilations will be rolling out the door next year, mark my words.

Swedish police spoke to two of The Pirate Bay’s convicted co-founders while they served their jail terms, it has emerged, in both cases seemingly on behalf of the FBI.

Both Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij have confirmed to Torrentfreak that they were questioned by police while in prison, with officers stating that they were asking questions on behalf of American investigators. It was hoped that the two men might be able to throw some light on where backups and logs for the always controversial file-sharing website might be stored and accessed, and on who is currently running the piracy set-up.

It seems there was little information of use either men could provide, they having not been actively involved with the file-sharing site for a number of years now, having been originally convicted for copyright crimes in relation to the Bay in 2009 (it just took them five years to get round to serving their jail terms).

Sunde says: “They asked many questions about the TPB backups and logs. I told them that even if they have one of the backups that it would be nearly impossible to decrypt”.

Meanwhile Neij, who was interviewed separately, adds: “They wanted to know if I could verify the accuracy of the IP-address logs, how they were stored, and how they could be retrieved”.

It’s not known what, exactly, the FBI was investigating in relation to The Pirate Bay. Swedish authorities have been particularly proactive in the last year in their bid to take the Bay offline once and for all, albeit unsuccessfully to date, despite some downtime in December and January.

But it’s thought the FBI might not be investigating the Bay itself at all. Sunde says the officers questioning him talked about Prenda Law, a notorious and now defunct American legal practice that was found guilty of “copyright trolling”, by placing pornographic content on The Pirate Bay, and then targeting those who downloaded the content with threats of legal action, with the option to settle out of court.

There were parallels between Prenda Law and disgraced UK law firm ACS:Law in terms of approach, though the American operation was even more dubious, not least because in most cases there was no actual client. The attorneys behind the operation were seemingly both client and legal representation, the aim being to simply embarrass file-sharers into paying out of court settlements, rather than actually targeting real copyright infringement.

Sunde told Torrentfreak: “I was told that Prenda Law has been under investigation for over a year, and from the printouts they showed me, I believe that”.

Having now served his time, former spokesman for The Pirate Bay Peter Sunde has been busy explaining why new anti-piracy measures in Australia won’t work.

Sunde was responding in particular to rules expected to pass the country’s Senate this week that will put in place a system for blocking access within its borders to piracy websites based outside Australia, replicating the sort of web-blocking process that has become the norm in many European countries, not least the UK. The web-blocking legislation accompanies other moves in Australia to force net firms to send warning letters to suspected online copyright infringers.

Speaking to Laterline on ABC, Sunde said that the new laws would be unpopular with voters, and wouldn’t work anyway. “For instance, in Denmark they tried to block Pirate Bay”, he mused. “What happened is that people found very easy ways to circumvent the block, and the traffic from those countries to Pirate Bay spiked afterwards”.

He went on: “People aren’t stupid and there’s really easy alternatives to circumvent most of these laws. So it becomes a kind of whack-a-mole game, and like a nuclear arms race as well, because you will have to block the next thing that will help people to circumvent things”.

Web-blocking hasn’t been without controversy in Europe of course, with critics questioning how effective forcing ISPs to block access to piracy sites really is, given proxies for circumventing the blockades are so easy to find on Google. Though rights owners insist web blocking still plays an important role in educating people as to which sites are legit and which are not, while also lobbying the likes of Google to play their part in delisting the proxies.

Sunde was chatting about Australia’s new anti-piracy laws as the file-sharing site he used to help run dropped the www prefix on its domains. With redirects not working for all manifestations of the Bay’s web address it led to a flurry of speculation that the site had been taken offline again. But no, it’s still there, providing you can circumvent any blockades and remember to drop to the www. And if you have no copyright morals to start with, obviously.

Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij, the final of the four men convicted for copyright crimes in relation to the always controversial file-sharing site to be jailed, is out of prison.

As previously reported, the Pirate Bay four – founders Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm and funder Carl Lundstrom – were all given jail terms for their role in running the file-sharing operation after a combined civil and criminal case in Sweden.

Appeals delayed incarceration, though didn’t succeed in overturning the convictions. Lundstrom managed to serve his sentence under house arrest, while the founders put off their jail terms by pursuing every possible legal route, and then just staying out of the way of the Swedish authorities (Svartholm going completely AWOL for a time).

But eventually the law caught up with all three founders. Neij was the last to be caught, on the Thai border last November, just as Sunde was completing his jail term. But the final of the four has now also served his time, with Neij released from prison yesterday. It means that all four have now served their sentences, though Svartholm has since been prosecuted and jailed for other hacking crimes.

As previously reported, last month Neij applied to have a court ruling seizing the Bay’s Swedish domain overturned, not because he cares about the site’s ongoing domain name issues, but because one of the reasons the court ordered the seizure of thepiratebay.se is that it is still registered in Neij’s name.

He is seemingly concerned that that could lead to accusations he is still involved in the Bay, and such involvement would breach past court orders. So he wants the court considering the domain case to acknowledge that his link to the domain is a hangover from the past, and that he has no formal link to it anymore.

It was another busy month on the CMU website, but taking the crown for the most-read news story in May was a hard-hitting report on Maroon 5’s Adam Levine having a bag of icing sugar emptied on his head. I assume people were flocking to read the batter-related joke I wrote for it.

Other items of note in the top ten include a 2014 report on the launch of Irving Azoff’s new collecting society Global Music Rights. Its sudden re-appearance was seemingly fuelled by interest in Azoff and his business affairs amongst the One Direction fanbase, mainly as a result of him and his family hanging out with Harry Styles from time to time.

The leak of Sony’s 2011 Spotify contract also featured, of course. As did the ongoing debate over whether or not SoundCloud can actually transition into becoming a money-making service for the music industry. However, above both of those were reports that Apple has been pressuring record labels to cut off freemium services entirely, which would have drastic implications for both Spotify and SoundCloud, in the unlikely event it was to actually happen.

Pirate Bay co-founder Fredrik Neij is to appeal the previously reported ruling in the Swedish courts that said the controversial file-sharing site’s flagship .se domains should be handed over to the authorities.

The ruling is the latest attempt by prosecutors and rights owners to take away the domains of prolific piracy sites, though the Swedish domain registry put up more of a fight than most, meaning attempts to take thepiratebay.se offline have taken quite a long time. And the appeal means there will now be a further delay.

When deciding that the Pirate Bay domains should indeed be handed over to the Swedish authorities, the Stockholm court noted that the TPB website has been previously deemed liable for copyright infringement in court, and that the domains are registered to Neij, who has personally been found guilty of criminal copyright infringement for his involvement in running the file-sharing operation.

It’s the latter point that Neij is appealing, probably because he was previously banned by the Swedish courts from having any involvement in the future running of The Pirate Bay and, while the domain still being registered in his name doesn’t mean he has actively broken that ban, he possibly worries that him being key to the new ruling in the domain case could set a dangerous precedent.

A legal rep for Neij told Torrentfreak: “The district court makes an erroneous assessment of how to look at a domain name. We believe it is an address assignment, not an estate. The prosecution has alleged two things. One is that crimes have been committed via The Pirate Bay. Fredrik Neij really has no views on this. The second is that he is involved in The Pirate Bay operation”.

Neij seemingly wants his link to the Pirate Bay’s Swedish domain to be removed from the court’s ruling, so to ensure there can’t be any further personal repercussions for him legally speaking. So it’s not actually an effort to stop the domains from being seized by the authorities, but will likely mean any seizure will now be delayed.

Though, of course, The Pirate Bay already has a stack of other domains lined up to replace the .se address if and when it goes offline.

The Stockholm District Court has ordered that two key domains used by the always controversial Pirate Bay – including the service’s flagship thepiratebay.se domain – should be handed over to the Swedish authorities.

The seizing of domains used by copyright infringing websites has become a common tactic in the entertainment industry’s battle against piracy, though how easy it is to take grab the domains of offending sites varies from country to country. There has been talk of The Pirate Bay losing its flagship domain in home country Sweden for a few years, but it took legal action against the organisation that controls the .se domain – Punkt SE – to make it happen.

Prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad, who was also behind the raid that knocked the Bay offline for a time late last year, led on that legal action, arguing that the file-sharing service is an illegal operation and its .se domains were therefore tools used to conduct copyright infringement. More over, Ingblad argued, Punkt SE should be held liable for the misuse of domains in its control.

Punkt SE countered that there was no legal basis for suggesting it was in anyway liable for the activities of individuals or organisations using a .se domain, and when it came to seizing the domains of copyright infringing sites, that was an ineffective way of dealing with piracy, because sites can quickly reappear at another web address, which will be just as quickly listed by the search engines, making it easy for file-sharers to relocate the set up.

After hearing arguments from both sides last month, the Stockholm court rejected the idea Punkt SE was in anyway liable for the actions of The Pirate Bay, but it did order that the domains be handed to state prosecutors, mainly because they are actually registered to TPB co-founder Fredrik Neij who was found personally guilty of copyright crimes back in 2009.

According to Torrentfreak, the court ruled: “Fredrik Neij has participated in [copyright] crimes that have been identified and he is the actual holder of the domain names. It is therefore no obstacle to confiscate domain names from him. The prosecutor’s primary claim with respect to Fredrik Neij should be upheld and domain names should be confiscated from him in accordance with the Copyright Act”.

While copyright industry groups have welcomed the ruling, thepiratebay.se still seems to be working just at the moment, and The Pirate Bay has decorated its home page with all the alternative domains it controls around the world, preparing users for the day the Swedish domain redirects to a stern government notice.

It’s been noted before that it’s a little ironic that The Pirate Bay, one of the music sector’s greatest foes in its battle against piracy, and Spotify, one of the industry’s greatest allies in turning former pirates into consumers, both hark from Sweden.

And while the Swedish authorities have at times led the legal battle against it’s more infamous digital progeny, the Swedish Institute has admitted that both The Pirate Bay and Spotify have helped put Sweden on the map worldwide.

According to Torrentfreak, both digital platforms were included amongst a list presented by the institute of brands that have helped Sweden boost its profile across the globe, alongside more traditional players like IKEA and Volvo.

And while conceding that housing The Pirate Bay has at times strained relations between Sweden and other countries when it comes to copyright debates, Torrentfreak reckons that “what cannot be denied is how the site has raised global interest in Sweden and ensured that when it comes to discussion and progression in the digital age – especially concerning entertainment distribution – this small Scandinavian country remains at the cutting edge”.

Some also note that services like Spotify possibly needed a vibrant file-sharing community from which to emerge. Partly because its business model – especially freemium – was a direct response to the impact of rampant piracy in a market where legit downloading never really took off. And partly because knowledge gained through developing file-sharing technologies informed the development of legit content services.

Swedish prosecutors are prepping to argue their case in court as to why The Pirate Bay’s flagship .se domains should be deactivated or put under government control, as copyright enforcers continue to try and make it harder for piracy platforms to operate.

Seizing domains, of course, is one of a number of tactics used by those fighting piracy, and authorities in other countries have done just that against various other sites, usually replacing the piracy operations with a notice alerting users that the site is no longer operational because of a copyright action.

The Bay has actually anticipated having its .se domains seized for a while, and at one point kept switching its primary URL to different domain registries around the world. Though it often saw those new domains quickly blocked by each new domain registry after action by local copyright industries or IP enforcers.

But the Swedish domain has so far remained unseized (even though ISPs in various countries have been forced to block access to it). Next week prosecutors will argue in the Stockholm District Court that it’s time to call time on thepiratebay.se. The action is being led by Fredrik Ingblad, who also oversaw the server raid against the Bay in Sweden last December, which resulted in the infamous file-sharing site going offline for a time.

Of course, even if Ingblad succeeds in his domain claim, the Bay will presumably have an assortment of other domains to use instead. And in the Google age it’s not so problematic if your domains keep changing. Though many rights owners argue that any barriers put in the way of piracy operations are a good thing.

In related news, the majors have filed legal action in the US against another piracy operation called MP3skull, which – aside from seeking $15 million+ in damages – deals with domain matters. The labels are seeking an injunction banning domain registries, server companies and, for that matter, advertisers from doing business with the piracy company.

Which is interesting in that would be a very wide-ranging court order, though obviously injunctions are constrained by jurisdiction – ie it could only apply in the US – which would limit its impact on a site currently using a domain registered in Tonga.

The Pirate Bay went down again this weekend, and for a time no one knew why.

The always controversial file-sharing site also went offline last year, of course, after its servers were raided. It returned to the web in February and, despite a few wobbles early on, has generally been functioning OK ever since.

When the site fell over without comment this weekend, some file-sharers feared another raid had occurred, but as the site reappeared this morning a spokesman told Torrentfreak: “There was a kernel panic on one of the boxes. It’s been fixed now”.

So now you know. Interestingly, while the site was down a message on the home page claimed that a CloudFlare back-up of the site was working, but this seemed not to be the case.

A large number of those artists are managed by Jay-Z’s own Roc Nation company, or other Live Nation affiliates, and reportedly walked away with $3 million as an incentive to become shareholders in Tidal. One of those artists was not Kylie Minogue, her having recently severed ties with Roc Nation. Was that a blunder on her part? You can decide for yourself. But her confirmation of the split was our most-read news story for the whole month of March, so at least she got something out of it.

Another big story in March was the Gaye family’s battle against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke, the conclusion of which rose to number eight in our chart. It was pushed down by a lot of goings on with web-blocks and other attempts to boost streaming services. At the bottom of the list is an old story about the Osmonds learning dance moves from Chuck Norris, which received a boost when Donny Osmond posted it on his Facebook page for some reason.

Good news for fans of web-blocks, the European courts are increasingly block-happy, with recent injunctions seeing The Pirate Bay being blocked in Spain and KickassTorrents in Denmark.

Spain was one of the first countries to consider forcing internet service providers to block access to copyright infringing websites with its so called Sinde Law, though it’s taken some time for the web-blocking to properly begin, whereas here in the UK, where web-blocking was all but removed from the Digital Economy Act in 2010, web-block injunctions have become a frequent event.

But ISPs in Spain are now having to block the always controversial Pirate Bay following a ruling in a Madrid court, this following the news earlier in the year that Vodafone was already blocking the site, albeit after getting confused by a bit of government communication, so that it eventually unblocked it. Only to now block it again. Good times.

In Denmark action by the Rights Alliance has resulted in twelve piracy sites, including KickassTorrents, being blocked by net firms there. Web-blocks have been common in Denmark for years now.

Though I’m obligated by journalistic convention to point out that web-blocks are limited in their effectiveness by the fact that proxy services provide ways around the blockades, and are usually easily found with a simple Google search. Yes, it’s all Google’s fault again. Kick ass.

Access to The Pirate Bay has been unhindered by most UK internet service providers for possibly a few weeks now, it has emerged, most likely because of changes behind the scenes at the always controversial file-sharing platform.

As much previously reported, so called web-block injunctions have been available under UK law for some time now, allowing the music and movie industries to force ISPs to block access to websites that judges agree exist primarily to promote and enable copyright infringement. Numerous file-sharing sites are now blocked by the major British ISPs as a result of such injunctions.

Though file-sharing services keep popping up at new locations, or proxies emerge designed to circumvent the blocks, and content owners and ISPs need to keep track of all the changes in order to ensure the blockades stay in place.

But seemingly Pirate Bay blocks recently stopped working on at least the BT, EE, Virgin and TalkTalk networks, most likely as a result of The Pirate Bay switching to an SSL service provided by US company CloudFlare, which made the HTTPS version of the Bay site (rather than the HTTP version) the default.

The operator of a block-dodging TPB proxy explained to Torrentfreak: “I believe [the unblocking is] because of how CloudFlare works. Simply put, when you enable HTTPS Strict on CloudFlare, they remove the HTTP Header from the request during HTTPS connections, thus when [the ISPs] try to inspect the header to a list of ‘banned’ websites it won’t register. So any site that uses CloudFlare, has a properly configured and signed SSL Certificate, and enables HTTPS-Strict under CloudFlare should be able to evade the ban that’s imposed by Virgin and perhaps other providers”.

So there you go. It seems that Sky’s web-blocks have been in place throughout, which possibly suggests it monitors changes on the file-sharing sites more closely. Given tha Sky is able to keep its blocks in place, presumably the other ISPs will make some changes and the web-blocks will return. But this wobble shows again that web-blocking isn’t just about scoring a one-off injunction in court, keeping the blocks in place requires constant refinements.

Web-blocking in the UK extended a little further earlier this week with websites listing web-block circumventing proxies the latest target.

As much previously reported, web-blocking has become an anti-piracy tactic of choice for the content industries in those countries where such measures are available, whether through court injunction or government agency. Web-blocks force internet service providers to block access to specific websites that exist primarily to enable copyright infringement, like The Pirate Bay.

But as soon as the ISPs start blocking the URLs of such sites, so that users see anti-piracy messages instead, so called proxies appear that enable users to get round the blockades and continue accessing unlicensed music and movies. So the content industries had to start getting web-block orders for the proxies too.

Every time one proxy is blocked another quickly springs up, and users keen for a freebie content fix can check in on web pages providing links to all the latest proxies, so getting around the blockades need not take more than a couple of clicks.

So, somewhat unsurprisingly, the content industries are now targeting those web pages too, presumably citing legal precedent set when the courts ruled against those sites that helped users find the latest illegal streams of movies and telly shows once the content owners started issuing takedown notices against YouTube et al.

According to Torrentfreak, among the proxy lists targeted by a recent web-block injunction were piratebayproxy.co.uk, piratebayproxylist.com and ukbay.org. The operator of the latter isn’t very impressed with the development, telling Torrentfreak: “The new blocks are unbelievable and totally unreasonable. To block a site that simply links to another site just shows the level of censorship we are allowing ISPs to get away with”.

Ah yes, the ‘c’ word. How dare the law censor your free speech right to not pay for the latest Ariana Grande record? “UKBay is not even a Pirate Bay proxy”, he went on. “It simply provides links to proxies. If they continue blocking sites that link to sites that link to sites, there’ll be nothing left”. Hmm, when it comes to sites linking to unlicensed content, I’m pretty sure that’s the point.

Though, of course, all this web-blocking is still heavily restricted while good old Google makes it so easy to find the latest proxies. And that’s the fight that’s still brewing.

Right, so, straight off this week, I’d like to draw your attention to number seven in our top ten most-read stories for last month. Or, more importantly, this article that doesn’t feature in the top ten.

‘The customary BRITs write-up (non ITV-approved version)’, sat there at number seven in our chart, is the punchline to that other article, and if you’re reading the former and not the latter (as seems to be the case for a lot of people) then you’re just reading an unnecessarily sweary report on this year’s BRIT Awards. OK, there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. But at least in recognition of the amount of effort that went into THIS ONE HERE THAT YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO READ take a quick look.

Right up at the top of our chart is a report on The Pirate Bay and developments at the always controversial site since its return to the internet, after going offline in December. Oh, and speaking of digital music services that have kept going far longer than anyone thought, Qtrax is also back – people’s surprise putting that news story at number ten.

Alongside web-blocking, where internet service providers are ordered to block access to copyright infringing websites, another favoured tactic of copyright owners fighting piracy services outside (partly or wholly) the jurisdiction of useful courts is domain name seizing, ie going to domain registries and arguing that a website is violating the domain organisation’s own terms and conditions by existing to help others infringe.

You might remember the last time The Pirate Bay thought it was going to lose its .se domain in Sweden, and then kept moving its main home page to new domains, each one of which was quickly revoked under copyright owner pressure, requiring another shift. Until Team TPB realised their .se domain probably wasn’t going to be revoked anytime soon. Though legal action is currently underway in Sweden again to try and force such revocation.

Some domain registries are more prone to quickly cave to copyright owner pressure than others, and until recently the Somalian registry was known to be pretty slack at responding to rights owner claims, and was therefore a good place for piracy sites to register. But then last month ever-popular file-sharing site KickassTorrents lost its .so domain, taking the service offline for a time and screwing up its Google rankings, even after it had resurfaced at the kickass.to domain registered in Tonga (a previous home for the service).

Now Torrentfreak has noted that a bunch of other domains containing the work Kickass have also been taken down by the domain registry in Somalia, even though most of them are not in anyway linked to the KickassTorrents operation (although some are rival file-sharing services piggy backing on the Kickass brand). Which suggests that .so is now a no-go domain registry for file-sharing operations.

Meanwhile, back in the world of web-blocking, this week courts in Portugal ordered local ISPs to block access to The Pirate Bay for the first time, further expanding the use of web-blocks as an anti-piracy tool across Europe (one with limited effectiveness, of course, given the blocks can generally be easily circumvented). And in Sweden, the entertainment industry’s long-running dispute with Bredbandsbolaget over Pirate Bay blocking is now set to go to court later this year.

The moderators are back on The Pirate Bay, which means that the fake and dodgy links are disappearing again from the always controversial file-sharing website.

As previously reported, while the Bay returned to the internet at the start of the month, having been taken offline late last year by a raid on its Sweden-based servers, behind the scenes not everything was back to normal. In particular, the site’s moderation panel was not reactivated for security reasons, an unpopular move with some of the Bay’s current moderators who at one point were threatening to launch a rival site.

But, according to Torrentfreak, some further security refinements have resulted in a number of moderators being allowed back into the system, and they have been busy cleaning out misleading new additions to the Pirate Bay database, making the access of unlicensed music and movie files less annoying for all those pesky file-sharers.

Though, don’t worry file-share-haters, the Bay is still facing a few challenges. The site has had to switch server hosts more than once since relaunching – resulting in some down time – as legal pressure is put on server firms around the world.

Meanwhile Swedish prosecutors are seemingly having another go at seizing the site’s main thepiratebay.se domain, and legal reps for the Swedish music and movie industries are pursing test case legal action to secure web-blocks against the Bay and other file-sharing sites in the country, similar to those already secured in various other jurisdictions, including the UK.

Our most popular news story in January combined the popularity of Enter Shikari with the distaste for the privatisation of the NHS to rise to the top of our top ten.

After that came an obituary for Joe Cocker, who died just before Christmas, and the first of two Aphex Twin-related stories to make the list. Also in the top ten was, of course, the month’s big news: the launch of former East 17 singer Brian Harvey’s new YouTube channel. And there were also rumours that The Pirate Bay was planning to relaunch (which it did).

It’s back. Did you miss it? Of course not, you’re a copyright respecting, creator supporting, artist enabling, law abiding schmuck. You don’t even know what The Pirate Bay is, and can’t even comprehend the news that the always controversial, yet ever popular file-sharing site is back online after a server raid temporarily shut the operation down back in December.

But yes, in a bold move for the freedom of expression online, aka free Ariana Grande and ‘Game Of Thrones’ downloads for all, The Pirate Bay re-emerged this weekend. A countdown to the 1 Feb had been, well, counting down on the old Pirate Bay homepage for sometime, though the site was actually up and running again on Saturday, making a mockery of the whole counting thing somewhat.

The site is pretty much as it was before Swedish authorities took the service offline during a server raid on 9 Dec. Though a phoenix currently sits on the home page where the site’s pirate ship logo would normally be seen, a handful of static pages are yet to re-emerge, and the whole site has wobbled quite a bit since its return, going down again several times, very possibly due to particularly high demand for its database of links to unlicensed music, movies and TV shows.

As expected, behind the scenes a moderation panel, whereby Pirate Bay staffers previously monitored links being added to the site’s database, has not be reactivated. According to Torrentfreak, this element has been removed to make the site easier to manage and reduce the risk of future shutdowns.

Though the move has been unpopular with some of those previously involved in running the file-sharing service, who argue it will make the TPB database less reliable. And some of those disgruntled former team members are reportedly now considering launching an alternative site, which means there could soon be multiple Pirate Bays. Indeed, back-ups of the site as of 9 Dec had already been posted elsewhere online.

But for today, why not relish in the joy of the original and supreme Pirate Bay being back on the web? By steering clear of it and telling everyone you meet that file-sharing is very bad indeed, obviously.

There is some confusion over whether or not The Pirate Bay is subject to a web-block order in Spain after it emerged that Vodafone was blocking access to the site in the country. When asked about the block, the net firm initially said it wasn’t aware it was in place, then said that it had been instigated following an order from the country’s Ministry Of Culture, and then said it had misunderstood a communication and was now unblocking access to the site.

Web-blocking, of course, has become an anti-piracy measure of choice for record companies and movie studios in a number of European countries. Blocks are usually achieved when rights owners secure an injunction against local internet service providers through the courts, either relying on specific web-block laws, or judicial interpretation of other existing copyright rules. Though many content companies would like a government agency to take responsibility for instigating the blocks on an ongoing basis.

Spain is one of the countries that has made moves in that direction. The country’s copyright laws having been initially unhelpful in the music industry’s fight against unlicensed file-sharing, the so called Sinde Law, introduced at the end of 2011, boosted copyright protection in the country, and a bunch of further refinements have been made more recently, again to the copyright owner’s benefit (in particular introducing hefty fines for the operators of file-sharing services).

When customers of the Vodafone ISP in Spain started reporting that they could no longer reach The Pirate Bay some thought it might be a result of the new copyright regulations, though strangely other net firms in the country weren’t blocking access to the site. After initially denying any knowledge of the blockade, Vodafone subsequently told Torrentfreak that it had blocked access to the Bay to comply with an order from Spain’s Ministry Of Culture, which was empowered to order web-blocks under Spanish law.

But then a spokesman for the company issued a new statement saying that the blockade had been instigated as a result of a communication it received last year, though it now realised that that communication was not an official request for the site to be blocked. An official source said: “We have been too diligent … we will lift the blockade of The Pirate Bay until we receive a warrant”.

So that’s all rather confusing. Of course, The Pirate Bay, blocked or not, is still down following a raid on its servers late last year, but everyone seems certain it will return to the internet this weekend.

Though sources tell the aforementioned Torrentfreak that the new Bay will be a streamlined version of the old site, with many of the people who previously monitored and tidied the database of torrent links no longer involved. That’s a development that has caused ructions amongst the group who have kept the site going in recent years, some of whom might now launch a rival service. Which, given there are already mirrors of the old Pirate Bay database online, could mean several Bays to enjoy, navigate and block. Good times.

For a while now it has been thought that the big bad Pirate Bay was planning to return to an internet near you on the 1 Feb, and yesterday a new homepage at thepiratebay.se added credence to those rumours. Mainly by being very like the controversial site’s old homepage.

As previously reported, the Bay went offline in December after a raid on the Swedish server facility hosting key elements of the file-sharing service. And while it wasn’t the first time The Pirate Bay’s servers had been seized, and despite previous claims by TPB operators that their set-up was now ‘raid-proof’, this time the site stayed offline.

At least one man linked to the site was arrested as part of the raid in Sweden, while another member of the team who had been running the file-sharing service in recent years told Torrentfreak that he and his colleagues were taking some time out following the takedown to consider their options. Pirate Bay’s original spokesman Peter Sunde said he thought it was time the site called it a day.

But by the Christmas break hints were being dropped that the site would return on 1 Feb, and that’s certainly what a countdown clock on thepiratebay.se suggests. Meanwhile yesterday much of the former Pirate Bay homepage was restored, although the search box and most of the links are not yet active, but people can click through to the PirateBrowser and PromoBay sister sites.

According to Torrentfreak the new homepage is being hosted by a server firm in Moldova called Trabia, which it’s assumed will also host core elements of the wider service if and when it goes live again. Of course, the company can expect to feel pressure from the music and movie industries, and maybe Moldovan authorities, should that happen, all of whom will likely call on Trabia to take the site down.

For its part, Trabia has told Torrentfreak that it does respect local copyright laws and that all users are bound by its own terms and conditions, though in the short term the current Pirate Bay homepage isn’t infringing anyone else’s rights. Which it isn’t.

Moreover, if and when the full TPB service goes live “the technology used, so called ‘magnet links’, is not violating the right of third parties directly” says the server firm. “[There] is actually no copyright infringement originating from websites such as thepiratebay.se which makes it a very complex case which is open for a lot of interpretation and discussions”.

Which is interesting. The “but we don’t do any actual copying” line was key to the defence of the four men, including the aforementioned Sunde, who were convicted in the Swedish courts for their role in running and funding The Pirate Bay in 2010. The judges weren’t convinced.

The same defence failed in various other key file-sharing legal battles around the world and, although there has been some debate on the point in a handful of jurisdictions, in the main courts have ruled without too much controversy that sites such as the Bay are liable for contributory or authorising copyright infringement, even though other parties commit the direct infringement. Though who knows what would happen if the matter had to be dealt with in the Moldovan courts.

Meanwhile back in Sweden the investigation into more recent Pirate Bay operations is ongoing. And, of course, online plenty of Pirate Bay clones are fully operational. Though those who always preferred the original will be watching their browsers with interest at the start of next month.

But what stories got the most traffic on the CMU website overall in 2014? If that’s the sort of thing you’d be interested in knowing, then you have arrived at the right place. Well done you.

Digital music legitimate, illegal and somewhere in between dominated the top ten for the year, with stories on The Pirate Bay, Grooveshark, SoundCloud and YouTube star Michelle Phan all appearing.

At number one was news of Gary Glitter aka Paul Gadd’s latest sexual abuse charges, above controversial comments from Ariel Pink (actually dating from 2012), the investigation into the death of former Static X frontman Wayne Static, HMV closing stores where it was unable to renegotiate rent prices, and a lesson in how sarcasm in headlines doesn’t always come across. Especially where One Direction are concerned.

All of which is pretty gloomy. There was a bit of positive light though. In at number ten is a report on Marc Gieger’s presentation at MIDEM. The William Morris Endeavor Head Of Music predicted that far from being on its last legs, he foresees the music rights industry growing into a sector that pulls in $100 billion a year.

As 2014 drew to a close, a suitably festive report on a radio station that plays only Christmas carols made it into the top ten most-read stories on the CMU website. However, at number one was the considerably less fun news that Bradford Cox of Deerhoof and Atlas Sound had been injured when he was hit by a car. There have been no subsequent updates on his recovery, but we hope he’s able to get back to work soon.

After that came an article on a Beach Boys release featuring previously unreleased songs from 1964. The digital-only release was put out to reboot the European copyright in those recordings, as The Beatles did last year. The article went on to speculate as to whether or not the Fab Four would do so again in 2014 – there was no confirmation at that point though fans were still holding out hope, but in the end nothing emerged.

Number three on the list was a late entry, and a significant one. Irving Azoff, in his new guise as publishing royalty collector, is gearing up for a battle with YouTube. Actually, the battle has been bubbling away nicely for a few months now, but Azoff’s lawyer is now talking about a billion dollar infringement lawsuit. This case will test the water for what is likely to be a year in which the publishing industry fights for a higher portion of streaming royalties – the vast proportion of which currently go to record labels.

As the future of The Pirate Bay remains uncertain following the server raid in Sweden that took it offline last week, Torrentfreak has noted that the controversial file-sharing site’s Facebook page has now also gone offline.

With over 470,000 likes, you might think that the Facebook profile would be useful for The Pirate Bay’s operators to communicate with their users while their site is offline. Though the file-sharing set-up hadn’t made great use of its page on the social network for some time, it being more of a hub for users to exchange messages, this last week mainly promote alternative torrent services and sites where the TPB’s database has been reposted online.

It’s not known whether Facebook itself deleted the page, presumably in response to a complaint or legal notice, or whether the people behind the Bay took the page offline.

If the latter, that might be linked to the news that the Swedish authorities are considering criminal prosecutions against those who have been running the site in recent years, that could result in jail sentences similar to those dished out to the service’s original three figureheads. Could the Facebook page deletion be Pirate Bay operators trying to cover their tracks? Presumably they’d know that nothing is ever really deleted on Facebook.

As previously reported, one of those operators has told Torrentfreak that the team behind TPB are currently considering their options regarding whether or not to try to get the site back online, though are in the main happy that other file-sharing sites – such as isoHunt – have published copies of the Bay’s database of torrent links.

But if The Pirate Bay itself is now offline for good, that would be the end of a significant and lively era in the music and movie industry’s long-running battle against online piracy. Though those monitoring torrent activity online reckon that the closure of the Bay has not had a particularly dramatic effect on overall file-sharing levels, with former TPB users finding alternative torrent search engines or those back-up copies of the Bay’s data.

The man arrested when Swedish authorities seized servers used by The Pirate Bay has been released from custody, according to Torrentfreak.

It was rumoured last week, as the server raid took The Pirate Bay offline, that one man had been detained. Although he has now been released, police investigations are ongoing, and both he and others may as yet be prosecuted.

The man in question was seemingly a moderator of the Bay. On the arrested person, prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad told reporters: “The suspicions relate to a violation of copyright law. Everything is being analysed now and new hearings may possibly be held”.

It’s thought that might mean the Swedish authorities are planning on prosecuting more people over their involvement in running The Pirate Bay. The service’s three original figureheads, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde, and a key funder of the site, Carl Lundström, were all convicted of copyright crimes in Sweden in 2009, and all served custodial sentences for their involvement in the Bay.

But by the time they were in court they’d passed running the controversial file-sharing website onto a new generation of operators and moderators. It’s thought that up to 50 people are now involved in the site, likely based all over the world. It remains to seen if any others are now arrested; presumably those within the Swedish jurisdiction are most at risk.

Although the custodial sentences for the original Pirate Bay Four were somewhat controversial at the time, other operators of file-sharing sites that exist to encourage and profit from copyright infringement have since been jailed in other jurisdictions. Rights owners and law enforcement agencies hope that such tough sentences will convince the operators of other unlicensed file-sharing services that it’s not worth running the risk.

As previously reported, one of The Pirate Bay’s current operators has told Torrentfreak he and his colleagues are now reviewing their options since the site went down last week, while watching with interest the rise of copycat sites republishing the file-sharing service’s data in other locations online.

One of the current operators of The Pirate Bay has told Torrentfreak that the community of up to 50 people who have run the site in recent years are now considering their options after Swedish authorities seized servers crucial to their operation last week, knocking the always controversial file-sharing website offline. But despite past boasts that the Bay was now pretty much raid-proof, they are yet to seemingly agree concrete plans to get the service back online in an official form.

Although the recent generation of Pirate Bay operators have been generally less vocal than the site’s one-time spokesman Peter Sunde back in the file-sharing hub’s heyday, the fact that no statement had been made at all about last week’s shutdown was surprising. But one anonymous Bay operator has now spoken, basically saying he and his colleagues are using the outage as an opportunity to take a break from running one of the most infamous piracy sites in the world.

Said the operator to Torrentfreak: “We were not that surprised by the raid. That is something that is a part of this game. We couldn’t care less, really. We have however taken this opportunity to give ourselves a break. How long are we supposed to keep going? To what end? [And] we were a bit curious to see how the public would react”.

Since The Pirate Bay went down, and it became clear that it wasn’t going to spring back up with the day, various copies of the site have appeared online, and some of these are now starting to add new content to their databases. Amongst them is oldpiratebay.org being run by the guys behind isohunt.to, which itself was a site that emerged after the original isoHunt website was shut down after its operator lost a legal battle with the US movie industry.

isoHunt’s homepage reads: “As you all probably know, the beloved Pirate Bay website is gone for now. It will be missed. It will be always remembered as the pilgrim of freedom and possibilities on the web. It’s the symbol for a whole generation of the internet users. In it’s honour we are making oldpiratebay.org search. We, the Isohunt.to team, copied the base of The Pirate Bay in order to save it to the generations of users. Nothing will be forgotten. Keep on believing, keep on sharing!”

On the copycat sites, Torrentfreak’s Pirate Bay man said: “Copycats are to be seen as a higher form of the proxies. If [The Pirate Bay’s] code [wasn’t] so shitty we would make it public for everyone to use, so that everyone could start their own Bay. Of course, there is a problem if [any TPB clones] try to scam people. But overall, we’d love to see a thousand Pirate Bays”.

The Pirate Bay remains unaccessible today, following the raid on a server hosting company in Stockholm earlier this week that took the site offline. The question many are now asking is, how did this happen?

As previously reported, in 2012 the site’s current owners claimed to have made changes to the way the site was hosted that would make it more resistant to such raids. At the time they explained that the service was now “hosted in the cloud”, meaning its data and code is shared on servers across the world (sometimes without the knowledge of the owners of said servers), making it impossible for the authorities in any one jurisdiction to seize the controversial file-sharing site’s machines and take it offline.

But that is exactly what has happened – one single raid has knocked the whole site off the internet. And although many are pointing to a site hosted in Costa Rica as evidence that it is coming back online, this site appears to only be a homepage, lacking any file-sharing functionality. TorrentFreak also reports that this mirror site previously existed prior to this week’s takedown.

TorrentFreak has also spoken to a number of people about how the site may have been taken offline, the current theory being that the site’s loadbalancer (a device which distributes traffic across servers) was switched off during the raid and it is that which has caused the ongoing shutdown. This would mean, in theory, that establishing a new loadbalaner could have the service back online relatively quickly.

Speaking to the BBC yesterday, Paul Pinter from Stockholm County Police said that the investigation which led to the discovery of the location of the Pirate bay servers lasted “for years” and added that several people are now being questioned. Although Pinter would not say if any arrests had been made, it is rumoured that one person has so far been detained.

The takedown directly affected the service’s thepiratebay.se domain, to which thepiratebay.org redirects, though other domains and proxies customarily used to access the site have also not been working for much of the last 24 hours.

Over night the service’s homepage did reappear at a new domain registered in Costa Rica, though at the time of writing that version of the site isn’t actually working – the homepage and community feed appear, but any attempt to access links to content via the site result in an internal server error.

Confirming that police action had targeted The Pirate Bay, the National Coordinator Of IP Crime at Stockholm County Police told Reuters yesterday: “We had a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm because of a copyright infringement, and yes it was Pirate Bay”.

Of course, it’s not the first time servers used by the Bay have been seized in Sweden resulting in downtime for the file-sharing service, though in the past the site has managed to resurface on different servers and/or domains.

And in recent years current operators of The Pirate Bay have insisted that refinements have made the site and its database more resistant to raids such as that which took place yesterday. It therefore wouldn’t be a surprise if the file-sharing site starts working again at some point.

TPB has, of course, been found liable for copyright infringement by encouraging and assisting others to infringe in multiple countries, usually resulting in web-block injunctions being instigated against the service, and in Sweden resulting in the site’s three founders being jailed for their involvement in the site.

Commenting on the latest takedown, one of those founders, Peter Sunde, who stepped away from involvement in the piracy operation years ago, has written a blog post saying that he is glad his former website is offline. He adds that he hopes it will now stay that way, saying that over “the past [few] years there was no soul left in TPB. The original team handed it over to, well, less soul-ish people to say the least”.

“TPB has become an institution that people just expected to be there”, he wrote. “[But with] no one willing to take the technology further. The site was ugly, full of bugs, old code and old design. It never changed except for one thing – the ads. More and more ads were filling the site, and somehow when it felt unimaginable to make these ads more distasteful they somehow ended up even worse”.

He concluded: “It feels good that it might have closed down forever, just a real shame the way it [was taken offline]. A planned retirement would have given the community time and a way to kick off something new, something better, something faster, something more reliable and with no chance of corrupting itself. Something that had a soul and could retain it”.

Web-blocking is gaining momentum in France, and this time it’s old favourite The Pirate Bay that is subject to some blocking. A court in Paris has ordered internet service providers in the country to stop their users from accessing the Bay following legal action by the French record industry via its grouping SCPP.

As much previously reported, web-blocking is becoming a favoured anti-piracy tactic in various countries across the world, and especially in Europe (and especially in the UK). Though, of course, it’s a tactic with limited success, because the blockades are usually quite easy to circumvent, not least via a Google search. The music and movie industries would like Google to do more to ensure so called proxies and web pages assisting in the circumvention of web-blocks are removed from its search engine results.

Google remains hesitant of getting involved in policing piracy sites in this way, though the web-giant does seem to be busy removing Android apps from its Play store which tap into The Pirate Bay’s directory of unlicensed content files in anyway. According to reports, apps like The Pirate Bay Proxy, The Pirate Bay Premium, The Pirate Bay Mirror and PirateApp have all been pulled for violating the terms and conditions of Google’s app platform.

It’s interesting that Google has, in the main, been more willing to cull piracy-enabling apps from its Play store than it is to de-list piracy-enabling sites from its search engine, though it might argue the former is much easier to police than the latter.

Bad news for fans of all three Pirate Bay founders being in custody at the same time. Perhaps the highest profile of the men that set up the always controversial file-sharing website, Peter Sunde, is out of jail having served more than five months after his 2009 conviction for copyright infringement relating to his role in running the Bay.

Although convicted in 2009, Sunde’s jail time didn’t kick in until he’d exhausted all routes of appeal. He then avoided prison for a further two years before being arrested in Sweden in May. He was incarcerated in a high-security prison, something he publicly criticised given the non-violent nature of his crimes, though some subsequently pointed out that he had basically spent two years on the run before being jailed, which may have explained the decision to put him in a more secure facility.

Nevertheless, five months in jail does seem to have had a considerable impact on Sunde’s health. According to Torrentfreak, he now plans to take some time out with family members before returning to his post-Bay business ventures, in particular Flattr. Indeed, while he seemed to heavily resent his incarceration, having served his time he can now get on with his entrepreneurial pursuits without the threat of arrest always looming on the horizon.

In something of a one-in-one-out scenario, Sunde’s release comes less than a week after his fellow TPB founder Fredrik Neij – the last of the men convicted in the 2009 trial against The Pirate Bay to serve his jail time – was arrested on the Thai border. Police in Thailand have since indicated he will now be extradited to Sweden to serve his prison sentence. Meanwhile the Bay’s third founder, Gottfrid Svartholm, has already served his time in relation to his copyright conviction, but remains inside because of other hacking charges.

So, whoever had November 2014 in the sweepstake for the month when all three Pirate Bay founders would be in custody, well done you. You get the prize. It’s a trolley dash around the Oxford Street HMV this lunchtime. Take as many CDs as you can in three minutes. One minute for each founder. We’ve not actually cleared it with HMV management, but we thought it would be more in the spirit of The Pirate Bay that way.

So yes, Fredrik Neij, one of the three men who created the always controversial Pirate Bay, has been arrested crossing from Laos into Thailand, seemingly by Thai immigration officials responding to an Interpol arrest warrant. It’s thought a Thai lawyer working for a US movie organisation may have provided border officials in the country with a photo of the last remaining Pirate Bay man at large.

As previously reported, Neij and his co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Peter Sunde were found guilty of rampant contributory copyright infringement in the Swedish courts in 2009. Having promised a precedent-setting defence after being charged by Swedish prosecutors for their role in running the Bay, the three men – and their primary funder, who was also charged – presented run of the mill arguments that had failed in numerous previous file-sharing cases.

Though this case was different to many of the previous file-sharing court hearings in that it was a combined civil and criminal trial, meaning that when found guilty of infringement the four men were given prison sentences as well as being ordered to pay mega-bucks damages.

However, the prison terms weren’t to begin until all routes of appeal had been exhausted. And by the time higher Swedish courts had upheld the earlier ruling, the three Pirate Bay founders were basically on the run (Svartholm not even showing up for appeal hearings). Lawyers for Carl Lundström, meanwhile, negotiated down his sentence to the point where he could serve it under house arrest.

Svartholm was the first of the Pirate Bay founders to be brought into custody, being arrested in and deported from Cambodia in 2012, partly because he was also wanted for alleged hacking offences. He has now technically served his time for the Pirate Bay copyright crimes, but was sentenced to another three and a half years in a Danish court last week over various hacking charges. Sunde, meanwhile, was arrested and thrown into jail in July.

It’s not completely certain what will now happen to Neij. According to Billboard, he has informed his lawyer that he has been told by Thai officials that he is to “be transported to Sweden”, though said attorney says no actual decision has been made regarding extradition. Though if he does return to Sweden, presumably he will go straight to jail without passing Go or collecting £200.

The jailing of the Pirate Bay Three has not been without controversy, of course, Sunde’s incarceration in particular being criticised by some, he being less of a hacker and more of an entrepreneur with new business ventures in development. Others have wondered why the Bay founders got jail while the operators of Napster, Grokster and Kazaa were subject to business crippling legal settlements, but not criminal charges or prison time.

Though, whereas some of the early file-sharing set-ups inadvertently led to rampant copyright infringement (usually with the founders subsequently ignoring it in order to build their businesses), The Pirate Bay was specifically set up to encourage and enable piracy (the clue is sort of in the name). Plus its founders, Sunde especially, were prone to mock the legal establishment in the early days, which was funny at the time, but will never help if you then find yourself asking a judge for clemency.

But, of course, none of this has stopped The Pirate Bay from happily continuing to operate, the founders having already pretty much stepped away from the site by the time of their 2009 trial. And whether prison time for Svartholm, Sunde and Neij will actually deter future piracy site founders is debatable. Still, some of the music and movie industry’s anti-piracy reps might argue, three out of three not free ain’t bad.

The most-read story on the CMU website in August was news of MEP Julia Reda’s visit to the Swedish prison where Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde is currently being held. She later detailed her meeting with the file-sharing service’s former spokesperson, commenting on the difficulties he says he has ensuring his rights as a prisoner are properly observed.

However, the two dominant stories in this month’s top ten were the collapse of ATP’s Jabberwocky festival and Morrissey’s departure from Universal’s Harvest label, taking up five slots between them.

As well as reports on the fall out from the last minute Jabberwocky cancellation, our fifth most-read news story was one from 2012 on the last time ATP ran into financial problems. Just missing out on the top ten, meanwhile, was the final confirmation that Morrissey had indeed ended his licensing deal with Universal, leading to his album being removed from download stores and streaming services.

At number ten is the answer to the question, “What happens when a lot of people Google ‘how is Rick Parfitt doing’ all at about the same time?”

As much previously reported, web-block injunctions have become a preferred anti-piracy tactic for the UK music and movie industries, where labels and studios secure court injunctions forcing internet service providers to block their customers from accessing copyright infringing websites.

The problem is, so called proxies quickly pop up that consumers can use to access blocked sites. So the content industries need to go after the proxies too. Which they have been doing for a while now. Amongst the latest of the proxies to be targeted is PirateProxy, which Torrentfreak says is the 125th most visited site in the UK.

Of course the people behind PirateProxy have already set up their service at a new domain. And while regular domain switches are a pain for those trying to access unlicensed free content, it’s not that much of a pain when a simple Google search for “The Pirate Bay” brings up a site offering a regularly updated list of proxies. Even at the top of a ‘news search’, let alone the web giant’s main search engine.

As also previously reported, moves are very much afoot to try and force Google to, as a matter of course, remove sites and proxies as courts issue web-block notices. Though until they do, the argument always put forward by web-blocking critics, that the blockades achieve little because they are so easy to circumvent, still seems valid.

Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda has written up her previously reported visit to Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde in prison last week. In her article for Torentfreak, she says that his rights as a prisoner are ignored unless he fights for them, and reveals his views on The Pirate Bay of today.

“If you don’t constantly insist upon your rights, you will be denied them”, Sunde told Reda. On this, she writes: “Repeatedly, he had to remind the guards that they’re not allowed to open confidential mail he receives from journalists. His alleged right to an education or occupation during his jail time in practice amounted to being given a beginners’ Spanish book”.

The MEP also echoes Sunde’s view that prison and copyright are very similar, stating that in both “there is a lack of transparency and the people in power profit from the fact that the average person doesn’t pay a lot of attention to the issue”.

Though, while both Sunde and Reda remain critical of copyright law, that doesn’t mean the former is still a champion of the file-sharing platform he helped create. Indeed, the Pirate Party rep reveals that Sunde is not a fan of what the website he helped to set up, and which landed him in prison, has now become, saying: “In Peter’s eyes, The Pirate Bay has run its course and turned into a commercial enterprise that has little to do with the values it was founded on. Nowadays, the most important battles for an open internet take place elsewhere, he says, noting that the trend towards centralisation is not limited to file-sharing”.

Sunde is now apparently hoping to spend most of the remainder of his sentence under house arrest rather than in prison, so that he is able to spend time with his sick father. After he is released, his next goal is to “develop ethical ways of funding activism”.

Julia Reda, a Member of the European Parliament, was due to meet with one-time Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde in jail yesterday, telling reporters before the visit that his incarceration was proof “our justice system has completely lost touch with digital culture”. Though Reda is a representative of The Pirate Party in the European Parliament, so that’s not too surprising.

As previously reported, Sunde was sentenced to eight months in jail in the Swedish courts for his role in enabling rampant copyright infringement through The Pirate Bay. He pursued every possible route of appeal, and then avoided the Swedish police, before being arrested in the country earlier this year and taken to the middle-level Västervik Norra prison.

Of course, The Pirate Party, although not officially linked to The Pirate Bay, is a long-time supporter of the popular file-sharing platform, which itself grew out of a political movement that advocated dramatic change to copyright rules.

Confirming she would be meeting with Sunde in jail, according to Torrentfreak Reda said: “I am visiting Peter Sunde in prison today to express my support. The unnecessarily harsh sentence he was given illustrates that our justice system has completely lost touch with digital culture. And the tactic of draconian deterrence against file-sharing has failed!”

Reda said she’d also discuss with Sunde the conditions at the jail where he is incarcerated, something the one time Pirate Bay man has already criticised.

So, Peter Sunde, one time spokesman for The Pirate Bay, which he co-founded, has found another reason to complain about his current incarceration, this time on religious grounds. Well, quasi-religious grounds anywhere but Sweden, which, alas, is where he’s currently locked up.

As much previously reported, Sunde is currently in jail after being found guilty of enabling rampant copyright infringement, through his involvement in the Bay, in the Swedish courts back in 2009. He evaded prison for a while by pursuing every possible appeals option, and once those were exhausted simply by avoiding Sweden. But then earlier this year Swedish police caught up with him in the country and threw him in the slammer.

Sunde has previously complained that the prison he’s in, the mid-level security facility Västervik Norra, is too severe given the nature of his crime. Which is probably true, though given the lengths he went to in order to avoid his jail time, perhaps the powers that be fear there is a risk Sunde would try to flee a low-security prison.

His latest complaint, though, relates to the prison authority’s inability to arrange a meeting between him and a representative of the Church Of Kopimism, which is a club for fans of free Lady Gaga tracks and ‘Glee’ downloads masquerading as a religion. Except in Sweden it has actually been recognised as a religious group, meaning Sunde’s demands to liaise with a rep from the ‘church’ are legit.

Prison bosses say they don’t have a minister from Sunde’s church on hand to meet him, but he’s bounced back with a demand that they set up a Skype call with one instead. According to Torrentfreak, he wrote in a letter to the authorities: “The board of spiritual care doesn’t have any representative for the Kopimist faith with whom they cooperate and therefore the Prison And Probation Service should provide permission for electronic contact with representatives from the Kopimist faith to believers”.

It’s not clear how genuine Sunde is being in these prison correspondences, or whether he’s just playing with the system, he having been known to issue rather playful statements during his stint as the Bay’s media man. Either way, he’s ensuring nothing remains dull about the ongoing Pirate Bay saga.

While Spain was one of the first countries to seriously consider web-blocking as a tactic in the fight against internet piracy with its so called Sinde Law, a court in the country has overturned a previous ruling that led to the blocking for a number of file-sharing sites.

Ever since the rise of internet piracy fifteen years ago, rights owners have struggled to stop the unlicensed distribution of their content online under Spanish copyright law, with judges often ruling that existing legislation didn’t deem individual file-sharers liable for infringement. But legislative reforms in 2011, in part motivated by lobbying by the American government, endeavoured to address the entertainment industry’s concerns.

And back in May the anti-piracy group FAP secured injunctions in court forcing internet service providers in the country to block various file-sharing set-ups, including SpanishTracker, PCTorrent.com, NewPCT.com, PCTestrenos.com, Descargaya.es and TumejorTV.com. As much previously reported, web-blocking of this kind has become the norm in a number of countries, including the UK, even though proxies can often be used the circumvent the blockades, as quickly occurred in Spain.

Nevertheless, the Spanish web-blocks were welcomed by the music and movie industries. But the ruling was appealed and, according to TorrentFreak, this week an appeals judge called of the blocks, saying there was “insufficient grounds” for blocking the offending sites in order to protect property rights. Which is a blow to the rights industries, who will now likely put new pressure on the Spanish political community, which is again considering the piracy issue, to put even stronger copyright protection laws onto the statute book.

In related news, The Pirate Bay has told TorrentFreak that its user numbers have doubled since 2011, despite it often being the first file-sharing site to be blocked whenever web-blocking becomes a reality in any one jurisdiction. The file-sharing set-up adds that about 9% of its users come via proxies, who are likely accessing the service in a country where ISPs have blocked the site’s primary domain.

Web-blocking critics argue that web-blocks are so easy to circumvent that they achieve nothing, though rights owners – while conceding that no anti-piracy tactic is perfect – argue that if Google and the search engines could be persuaded or forced to remove all and any web-block circumventing proxies from their search lists, then the blockades would be much more effective.

Recently jailed Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has written to the Swedish probation board asking that he be moved to a jail more appropriate to his crime, which presumably would be a prison ship.

As previously reported, Sunde was one of four men handed jail terms for their role in setting up and running the controversial file-sharing website, and in doing so enabling and encouraging mass copyright infringement. His prison sentence was initially postponed while he exhausted all possible appeal routes, and then further because Sunde avoided the Swedish jurisdiction. But then last month he was arrested while in the country.

According to Torrentfreak, Sunde is currently incarcerated in a Swedish jail called Västervik Norra, which is a mid-level facility under the country’s three-level prison system. But the former Pirate Bay spokesman reckons that he should qualify for a lower-level prison because he poses a low risk. In his letter to the authorities Sunde adds that his current situation is having an impact on his health.

He writes: “I hereby appeal the placement decision regarding the institution I am in. I believe that the safety class is too high for the crime I have been convicted of. I’m suffering tremendously – socially, physically as well as psychologically – by the shortcomings of Västervik”.

Since Sunde’s incarnation, only one of the so called Pirate Bay Four has yet to begin serving his time. It’s thought Fredrik Neij is currently living somewhere in Asia.

As much previously reported, web-blocking has become a favoured tool of rights owners in the ongoing battle against online piracy in a number of jurisdictions, not least the UK. Even though so called proxies are always quickly set up wherever piracy sites are blocked to help users circumvent the blockade and find the pile of unlicensed content they are looking for.

Argentina recently became the first country in Latin America where a web-block has been instigated, with the courts ordering internet service providers in the country to block access to The Pirate Bay. It was CAPIF who secured the court order, which is why they were at the receiving end of the hack.

According to TorrentFreak, the TPB proxy was in place via the trade body’s domain for around ten hours before being taken offline. AT the time of writing, it remains down.

Dutch internet service provider XS4ALL has confirmed to Torrentfreak that the country’s anti-piracy group BREIN has filed its appeal to the Netherlands Supreme Court over the web-blocking of The Pirate Bay in the country.

As previously reported, in 2012, on its second attempt, BREIN secured a web-block injunction against the infamous file-sharing website, ie a court order which told Dutch internet service providers, including XS4All, that they must block their users from accessing the Bay. But, whereas in the UK the net firms have generally accepted and complied with such injunctions, even if a little reluctantly, the Dutch ISPs appealed the web-block ruling, and in January succeeded in the High Court.

BREIN confirmed that it would take the matter to the country’s highest court in February, and, says XS4ALL, legal papers were actually filed in late April. The ISPs have until 5 Sep to respond. The anti-piracy group’s Supreme Court appeal doesn’t deal with new evidence or the original arguments for or against web-blocking, but rather focuses on procedural or legal interpretation failings that may or may not have occurred during the high court hearing.

XS4ALL told Torrentfreak: “The facts as determined by the [High] Court are fixed, the case will not be materially redone and the Supreme Court itself will not perform an investigation. [BREIN] cannot bring more new facts, nor contest the facts. Only the legal criteria which the court has applied will be questioned. If the appeal is successful and the judgement of the lower court is set aside, it may be sufficient to conclude the case. If a new examination of the facts is necessary, the Supreme Court will probably refer back the case to the [High] Court for a full retrial”.

January’s ruling resulted in existing web-blocks against The Pirate Bay being lifted in the Netherlands. As previously reported, web-blocking has become a preferred anti-piracy tool in various territories, and especially the UK, even though critics dispute the effectiveness of such blocks.

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/dutch-piracy-group-has-begun-appeal-over-web-block-ruling/feed/0Norway could be next to web-block The Pirate Bayhttp://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/norway-could-be-next-to-web-block-the-pirate-bay/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/norway-could-be-next-to-web-block-the-pirate-bay/#commentsTue, 10 Jun 2014 09:54:15 +0000http://www.completemusicupdate.com/?p=108112

Norway could be the next country to introduce web-blocks, with anti-piracy group the Rights Alliance confirming that it is planning legal action to force internet service providers in the country to stop users from accessing key file-sharing websites, with The Pirate Bay likely to be the first target.

Web-blocking, of course, has now become common in a number of countries, especially in Europe, and including the UK. If a content lobby can convince a judge (usually, though in Italy a government body is being empowered to block) that a website exists primarily to enable others to infringe copyright, and has made no efforts to limit infringement on its platform, but can’t be targeted directly because of jurisdiction issues, then the court may pass an order forcing ISPs to block access to the offending site.

While net firms have in the main resisted calls to voluntarily block sites like The Pirate Bay, most accept and adhere to such court orders with minimum fuss. So no surprise, in Norway ISP Telenor has already commented on the Rights Alliance’s calls for it to block the Bay, telling reporters: “We cannot act as a court or a police authority to act for third parties who want sites to be closed. We will only deal with a court decision”.

With that in mind, Rights Alliance boss Willy Johansen has confirmed to Aftenposten that his group is now preparing to take the matter to the Oslo District Court in the next few weeks, with hopes that the group can secure Norway’s first web-block injunction by the end of the summer. According to Torrentfreak, while in the UK web-blocks were secured by the music and movie industries under existing copyright laws, new legislation in Norway has specifically paved the way for web-block injunctions.

Of course, critics point out that web-blockades are actually pretty easy to circumvent, with a simple Google search enabling UK web-users to access the Bay and other supposedly blocked sites. Though the content industries maintain that web-blocking is still an important anti-piracy measure, if only to educate people about which sites are legal and which are not.

May’s most popular news story on the CMU website (by quite some distance) was the news, at the beginning of the month, that SoundCloud was about to switch off access to its ‘classic’ design. This left users with no option but to access the site through the newer version, launched in 2012.

Just before Beats was snapped up by Apple for $3 billion (and perhaps because that deal was about to go through), both sides of the company found themselves hit with lawsuits last month. First, Beats Music was sued by David Hyman, the founder of the MOG streaming service on which it is built, claiming that he was forced out of the company. Then the headphone-making side of the business was sued by Steven Lamar, who was involved in the vert early days of Beats, claiming that he was cut out of a royalty deal.

Another big story in May was the indie labels’ battle with YouTube. The Worldwide Independent Network, the body that brings together indie label trade groups from across the globe, went public with its criticism of the Google subsidiary over its handling of negotiations for its planned audio streaming service.

Peter Sunde, perhaps the highest profile of The Pirate Bay’s founders, has been arrested in Southern Sweden and is now set to serve the eight month jail sentence he was handed for his role in running the always controversial file-sharing website.

Although few specifics about the arrest have been revealed, a spokeswoman for the Swedish National Police Board told Reuters: “We have been looking for him since 2012. He was given eight months in jail so he has to serve his sentence”.

Sunde was the official spokesman for the Bay in its early years, and during its first run-ins with the content industries, the courts and the authorities, and became known for issuing defiant and often amusing statements whenever the music or movie industries moved – always unsuccessfully – to have the file-sharing service shut down.

When he, his co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, and their main financial backer Carl Lundström, all ended up in court in 2009 facing combined civil and criminal charges for enabling and encouraging rampant copyright infringement, Sunde promised ground-breaking legal arguments that would shake up the copyright system.

But his lawyers relied on more conventional defence lines – “but we didn’t actually host any of the infringing content” – and the four men lost the trial, being ordered to pay mega-bucks damages to the music and movie industries, and to serve a year in jail. All the men appealed, but the second court upheld the ruling, and increased the damages payments, but reduced the jail terms a little.

Svartholm by this time had gone AWOL, not even showing up for his appeal, so that his jail term wasn’t altered. He was eventually arrested in Cambodia in 2012, mainly because of unrelated hacking charges, and has since served his jail time relating to TPB. Lundström, meanwhile, managed to get his jail term reduced sufficiently that his legal team could negotiate that he serve the time under house arrest, which he did.

Neij and Sunde, however, circumvented their jail time, partly by pursuing an assortment of other appeal routes, and partly by steering clear of Sweden. Though Sunde couldn’t be accused of going into hiding, being the frontman of another tech start-up called Flattr and representing The Pirate Party in the recent European elections in Finland.

But Sunde’s business and political projects will now be on hold for eight months as he finally serves his time over the 2009 Pirate Bay conviction. Asked about the latest turn of events, Eileen Burbidge of Passion Capital, who both backs Flattr and sits on its board, told TechCrunch she was “deeply saddened” about Sunde’s arrest.

She said: “I believe that history will look back on peer-to-peer and file-sharing networks and highlight what a farce it was for the recording industry to litigate against developers and technology providers who wrote software – which enabled both legal and illegal activities alike as agnostic platforms. This is akin to suing ISPs for what internet users do or the telephone company for illegal activities people might conduct/transact in a telephone call”.

She went on: “The fact that Peter has been arrested in order to serve out a criminal sentence for his role in The Pirate Bay is such a stark contrast to where other individuals are at the moment such as Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker – two of the founders of Napster – or Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis – two of the founders of Kazaa”.

“All of these others are heralded as tech visionaries, wunderkinds and positive disruptors for their respective roles in peer-to-peer development, file-sharing and how technology has impacted users’ consumption of content and information. They are all now venture capital or angel investors, heralded as industry luminaries – meanwhile two of the co-founders of The Pirate Bay are sitting in jail cells”.

Of course, the content industries, and Swedish prosecutors, might note that the Napster founders never intended to enable rampant copyright infringement when they developed and first distributed their file-sharing software. Whereas The Pirate Bay was deliberately set up to not only enable but also promote copyright infringement (the clue is in the name).

And while Kazaa did it’s own bit of jurisdiction dodging to stay online, after the record industry finally caught up with the P2P firm in the Australian courts, and won, a precedent had now been set in multiple territories that the “but we didn’t host the infringing content” excuse wasn’t as solid as Team Bay pretended in the run up to the Swedish case.

Also, The Pirate Bay – and Sunde especially – did a fair bit of taunting the legal establishment in the early days of the rogue file-sharing platform, which can be funny, and often was, but is never going to help when your legal arguments fall flat and you find yourself asking a judge for clemency.

Though Sunde supporters, like Burbidge, might in return note that the Pirate Bay’s founders were no longer formally linked to the site by the time of their 2009 court case, that the service has continued to operate unhindered by the prosecutions, and the fate of the Bay founders hasn’t stopped a whole new generation of programmers from developing their own copyright circumventing software and platforms.

Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde’s most recent attempt to have his conviction for copyright infringement quashed has failed.

As much previously reported, Sunde was one of three co-founders of the always controversial file-sharing platform who was found guilty of enabling rampant copyright infringement in a combined civil and criminal case in the Swedish courts. He received a jail sentence and massive damages bill as a result of the trial.

However, Sunde has been fighting the case against him ever since, and so far has avoided any jail time in the process. Though his various appeals have not been successful. An appeal court upheld the original ruling (though amended the penalties), then the Swedish Supreme Court refused to hear the case, then the Swedish authorities knocked back Sunde’s appeal for ‘clemency’, and then the European Court Of Human Rights said it wasn’t a matter on which it had a right to intervene.

After all that, earlier this year Sunde had another stab at the Swedish Supreme Court, with a team of legal academics arguing that the “changing legal climate” in the European Union meant the longterm argument of the Bay’s founders – that they didn’t actually host any infringing content, and shouldn’t be liable for the infringement the Bay enabled others to commit – had a new found credibility.

But, according to local media, the Supreme Court did not agree, stating that there was no new evidence available and therefore there was no need to revisit the case. Responding to the news, Sunde told Torrentfreak: “It doesn’t affect me that much, it’s just more evidence that Sweden has no intention to follow the law or EU-regulations at all”.

The French record industry is following its UK counterpart in seeking a web-block injunction against The Pirate Bay, which would force internet service providers in the country to stop their customers from accessing the controversial file-sharing site via its principle domains.

And according to NextINpact, the lawsuit filed by the French Civil Society Of Phonographic Producers back in February, and now being shared with France’s net sector at large, also names over a hundred Pirate Bay proxies, which help web users circumvent ISP-initiated web-blocks.

As previously reported, the web-block route to limiting illegal file-sharing has become increasingly fashionable in anti-piracy circles in recent years, especially in Europe, in countries where either new laws have passed allowing such web-blockades, or where rights owners have successfully argued web-blocking injunctions are allowed under existing copyright regulations.

Although the French government’s three-strikes programme for combating file-sharing has been much more high profile (even if its successes have been disputed), a web-block case succeeded in the country last year, albeit one targeting sites that enabled the unlicensed distribution of movie and TV content.

That case was particularly interesting in that search engines were also ordered to remove the offending sites from their listings; a common complaint from labels and studios being that although in some countries web-block injunctions are now relatively easy to secure, their effectiveness is hindered by the ease with which blocked sites can still be found via Google et al.

It’s not known if the French record industry’s efforts to block access to The Pirate Bay also includes the search engine element, though most of the country’s big ISPs have now been informed of the labels’ web-blocking efforts.

The always contentious Pirate Bay hit a new milestone on Monday when, according to Torrentfreak, it processed its ten millionth torrent upload. The shared file linked to a pirated copy of a video from the ‘Intimate Lesbians’ series, in case you wondered.

The landmark moment caused a little stress behind the scenes as a bit of code needed to be reworked to accommodate the extra digit, but that was quickly achieved and so the file-sharing set-up can march onwards, after over a decade of circumventing lawsuits, shutdown requests and web-blocks.

Talking of which, the Bay’s own landmark moment follows another stat of note from last weekend when Google removed the two millionth Pirate Bay link from its search engine at the request of rights owners whose content is being made available without licence via the file-sharing platform.

Google reckons that the two million takedown requests (which were submitted via 93,070 takedown notices) relating to content accessed via a piratebay.se URL (still the main TPB domain, despite various stints using other web addresses) accounts for 1-5% of the Pirate Bay links indexed by the mega-search engine.

Of course, as previously reported, the music and movie industries would like Google to just block any URL that begins with a Pirate Bay top level domain, rather than having to identify every single bit of content by its unique locator.

The web giant, however, has refused to adhere to that request, arguing it would be too wide-ranging a blockade, though some in the content industries hope that web-block type injunctions – usually targeted at internet service providers – might be extended to force search engines to act in this way.

Dutch anti-piracy group BREIN intends to take its web-blocking efforts to the Supreme Court in the Netherlands, after the country’s High Court overturned blockades instigated against The Pirate Bay.

As previously reported, in 2012, on its second attempt, BREIN secured a web-block injunction against the infamous file-sharing website, ie a court order which told Dutch internet service providers Ziggo and XS4All that they must block their users from accessing the Bay. But, whereas in the UK the net firms have generally accepted and complied with such injunctions, even if a little reluctantly, the Dutch ISPs appealed the web-block ruling, and last month succeeded in the High Court.

For the music and film industries in several countries, web-blocking is becoming the most important weapon in the battle against online piracy. Such blockades are not without controversy, of course, and opponents always point out that it’s actually quite easy to circumvent the web-blocks. Though the rights owners increasingly hope that if they can also force the search engines to stop listing blocked sites – and any proxies set up to help get round the blockades – then actually such a system will deter more casual web-users from accessing unlicensed content sources.

But the Dutch High Court ruled last month that the blocks were “ineffectual” and “constitute an infringement of [people’s] freedom to act at their discretion”. BREIN Director Tim Kuik confirmed to the website Tweakers that the organisation would continue to fight on the issue, though admitted that the next round of appeal could take eighteen months to go through the motions. Kuik said: “Depending on the type of appeal it can take a year to eighteen months before a decision. Moreover, there are still questions for the European Court Of Justice so it might take even longer”.

The Pirate Bay blocks in the Netherlands will come down in the meantime.

While the Irish record industry has successfully secured web-blocking injunctions against The Pirate Bay, the labels there still want the internet service providers to participate in a three-strikes type system, sending out warning letters to suspected file-sharers.

As previously reported, Ireland’s biggest tel co Eircom reached a voluntary settlement with the country’s record industry to set up a three-strikes style system to target file-sharers. Despite a challenge over the legality of the scheme, the anti-piracy programme is still ongoing.

After reaching its deal with Eircom the Irish record business pledged to pressure the ISP’s competitors to introduce similar schemes, though in that domain it has been a lot less successful. Ireland’s second biggest net firm UPC hasn’t been especially willing to play ball, and has fought legal efforts to force it to introduce three-strikes, arguing such measures would require a change in Irish law.

UPC prevailed first time round, but according to the Irish Times the labels are having another go, believing that it now has the country’s political community on its side. According to the newspaper, Irish record industry trade body IRMA monitored UPC customers during November last year and reported 7757 copyright infringements to the net firm. The (slightly paraphrased) message from IRMA: do something about this you bastards.

But UPC still argues that ploughing ahead with a three-strikes programme would raise a “serious question of freedom of expression and public policy and demands fair and impartial procedures in the appropriate balancing of rights”. That, Team UPC say, would require a three-strikes law to be introduced.

The new legal action has been filed with Ireland’s Commercial Court, with a hearing in the case scheduled for April.

Proving that it’s not just the record labels who can be very persistent when it comes to pursuing legal action on piracy issues, Peter Sunde, co-founder and former spokesman for the once hilarious (when Sunde was writing the press releases) Pirate Bay is having another go at having his copyright infringement conviction overturned. He really doesn’t want to go to jail. Even though, if he got jailed with some hackers, he could do some valuable research for his newish encrypted messaging platform Hemlis.

As much previously reported, in addition to approximately 11,309 civil actions against The Pirate Bay around the world, the three founders and a key funder of the Bay faced criminal action for their involvement in the piracy-enabling venture in Sweden. And they lost the case. Twice. And then the country’s Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. Meaning Sunde faces jail for his role in the copyright infringement The Pirate Bay enabled.

But Sunde has successfully put off prison pursuing various routes of appeal, including trying to fight his case in the European Court Of Human Rights, and appealing to the Swedish authorities for clemency. Now, according to Torrentfreak, he is having another stab at Sweden’s Supreme Court, hoping that a “changing legal climate” in the European Union will aid his argument that, as an enabler of infringement rather than an infringer himself, he shouldn’t be jailed for copyright crimes.

Sunde told TF: “There are new cases from the EU that have proven that I should not have any responsibility, so my case should be re-opened and I should win the case. Of course I never really had a fair trial to begin with. [But there’s now] a chance it will be re-tried, but it’s always hard to say. In any case, it’s a shot worth taking just to prove a point”.

As we followed The Pirate Bay’s main domain as it moved from country to country last year it became clear that rights owners had identified that one way to hinder the operations of piracy outfits was to go after their web addresses. That is to say, persuade or pressure domain registries or registrars that they should disable the domain names used by sites that enable rampant copyright infringement.

But what are the obligations of domain registries (the organisations that control specific top level domains, like the UK’s Nominet) and domain registrars (companies that manage domain registrations for website owners, like 123Reg and Go Daddy) in this area?

A recent arbitration ruling stated that, while registrars can suspend the domains of customers which they suspect are involved in piracy (mainly because the registrar’s own T+Cs will let them), they can’t prevent that customer from moving their domain management to another company unless a court order bans it.

This arbitration ruling followed letters sent to domain firms last year by the City Of London Police’s IP Crime Unit, which led to some registrars suspending the web addresses of some piracy set-ups, and then preventing them for moving said domains elsewhere. But the arbitrator said they couldn’t do that.

Nevertheless, a recent judgement in the Regional Court of Saarbrücken in Germany ruled that domain registrars do have an obligation to act against websites that exist in order to enable copyright infringement, and if they fail to do so they could be held liable for their customer’s infringing activity.

The case in question related to domain firm Key-Systems and its client H33T, a significant torrent tracker that was knocked offline for a time last September after Universal Music went after its domain, on the back of rampant file-sharing of Robin Thicke’s ‘Blurred Lines’.

Last week’s court ruling confirmed that Key-Systems was obliged to act on the copyright complaint, because had it not done so it could have faced a 250,000 euro fine for infringement. This despite an earlier ruling in Germany’s federal courts that said the country’s actual domain registry, DENIC, was generally not liable for the activities of web operations using its domains.

What isn’t clear from the new ruling – and where this might prove to be particularly controversial – is on what grounds a domain registrar is obliged to act, ie who is to decide whether a website is liable, or not, for copyright infringement. Can a domain firm wait until it receives a court order, or could it be held liable for infringement if it doesn’t respond proactively to any complaint?

Either way, Germany’s record industry trade group BVMI welcomed the recent judgement, with its boss man Dr Florian Drücke telling reporters: “With the current judgment, the Regional Court of Saarbrücken has for the first time clarified the responsibility of a registrar in respect of copyright infringements carried out via a domain registered by him. For rights holders this offers a new protection option to take action against portals with illegal offers on the net”.

But reps for Key-Systems argue that the court made the wrong decision. It’s legal rep Volker Greimann told Torrentfreak: “Let’s just say that this is not the final word on the matter. We are currently reviewing the judgment and our options for having this overturned in the next instance. This judgment makes no legal sense and is full of errors. If this judgment stands, it will have dire consequences for the kind of services German registrars can provide”.

The Dutch High Court has overturned a lower court order forcing two internet service providers in the country – XS4ALL and Ziggo – to block their users from accessing The Pirate Bay. Calling the blocks “ineffectual”, the court also stated that the blockades “constitute an infringement of [people’s] freedom to act at their discretion”.

As previously reported, whereas UK ISPs have, in the main, accepted web-blocks where instigated by court order, XS4ALL and Ziggo have been very vocal in their opposition of such anti-piracy tactics. So when a court case brought by anti-piracy group BREIN, though initially unsuccessful, did result in web-blocks against TPB being ordered by the Netherland’s lower court in 2012, the two ISPs appealed the case to the High Court at The Hague. And yesterday they won.

In a statement, XS4ALL said: “XS4ALL is relieved by the ruling. We are very pleased that the court of has protected the fundamental right of all Dutch citizens to freely access information”.

It added: “Like BREIN, we are against sharing copyrighted material without permission … [However,] XS4ALL believes in the potential of the internet. Unimpeded freedom to access the internet provides an unprecedented breeding ground for new possibilities and opportunities. For the entertainment industry, initiatives such as iTunes, Spotify and Netflix clearly show [the capacity for such possibilities]. The solution for downloading from illegal sources is not in the curtailment of freedom, but making the most of this freedom”.

In the UK, the film and music industries have successfully gained a long list of web-blocks against file-sharing websites, including The Pirate Bay. Critics of the web-block injunctions here would also argue that the blockades are ineffectual – because anyone with the slightest desire to access any of the blocked sites can still do so with little effort. However, the entertainment industry would likely counter that anything that makes it slightly more difficult or annoying to do so is a step towards convincing people to use easier-to-access legal services.

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Looking back through the website stats for 2013, the ongoing saga of The Pirate Bay comes out as the dominant news story of the year, with four reports on the file-sharing service appearing in the top ten – fans of symmetry will be pleased to see they occupy the top two and bottom two positions.

In first place was a report on the owner of Pirate Bay proxy PirateSniper (one of many services enabling people to circumvent web-blocks against TPB) being visited by police and representatives of the Federation Against Copyright Theft at his home. The legalities of offering a proxy are something of a grey area, but he was nonetheless given a stern talking to.

Below that came news of TPB changing its top level domain to one based in Peru, just one of many such moves the website made in 2013, which ultimately saw it back where it started, using previously defunct .se and .org domain names.

Elsewhere, a chapter in the year’s most shocking music-related news story featured high in the list, an early report on the arrest of former Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins for sexual offences against children. Last month, of course, Watkins was sentenced to 29 years in prison, after pleading guilty to many of the charges against him.

Also popular amongst readers in 2013 were articles on members of Joy Division being questioned by police during the hunt for the Yorkshire Ripper, Lana Del Rey’s ‘Tropico’ film, the (slow) progress of Tool’s next album, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs banning phone cameras from a gig in New York, and Harry Styles’ description of his perfect girl.

The Pirate Bay dominated our most-read news stories in December, taking the top three places in the top ten, as well as another further down.

The sudden rush of news reports about the file-sharing website came as it rapidly changed its top level domain name four times in nine days, before ending up using its .org and .se addresses again. These were the domains the Bay had originally ditched amidst fears they’d be blocked, the move that kicked off the cat-and-mouse game of trying to find a URL immune to interference from rights owners and domain registries.

Elsewhere, there was the sentencing of former Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins for sexual offences against children, which saw him receive a total of 29 years in prison, plus another six on licence. Though sadly, with UK police continuing to investigate allegations against Watkins, and police in Germany and the US now investigating possible crimes by the singer in those countries too, it seems unlikely that the sentencing was the conclusion of this story.

In other artist news, highest on the list were unconfirmed reports that Def Leppard might be preparing litigation against One Direction over similarities between the title track of the boyband’s new album, ‘Midnight Memories’, and the Sheffield rockers’ hit ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’. Also, there was the news that Dappy was denying vehemently that he was bankrupt (it turned out to be his former N-Dubz bandmate Fazer who’d run out of cash), and that the US publisher of Morrissey’s autobiography had cut out references to a homosexual relationship in the book.

On the business side of things, HMV’s confirmation that it was ditching gadgets from its stores gained a lot of interest, as did the launch of Spotify Artists, a site set up by the streaming service in an attempt to placate its detractors.

Having tried on a few various domain names for size in countries all around the world over the course of this year (and mostly the last week and a half), The Pirate Bay has returned to its Swedish web address. Well, it’s always nice to put on a familiar jumper at Christmas.

As much previously reported, having switched to it from a .org domain in 2012 after the US authorities seized MegaUpload’s also American-registered .com address, The Pirate Bay then abandoned its .se domain in favour of a Greenland-registered URL in April this year, in anticipation of its Swedish domain being seized by the authorities there.

However, a few days later the company that oversees Greenland’s domain registration said that it would block the new URL, due to the country’s affiliation to Denmark where the file-sharing service is deemed illegal, leaving TPB to sail over to Iceland to try a new domain there.

The site was again on the move mere days later, after an injunction against the .se domain went into effect in Sweden – with Swedish lawyers arguing that as the Icelandic domain was registered in the name of TPB co-founder Fredrik Neij, who is a Swedish national, the injunction counted against that URL too. Which takes us up to the beginning of May, and a slightly longer stint registered on the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten, which lasted until last week.

Since then, it’s been all action, with a move from Sint Maarten to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic, followed by Peru, then on Wednesday Guyana, the latter domain briefly forwarding back to the .se domain name before being taken offline yesterday. The original .org address is also now functioning, forwarding onto thepiratebay.se.

Although the move back to the Swedish domain raises more questions than any of the other domain shifts this year, The Pirate Bay has been unusually quiet about it, not even announcing that it was using the Swedish address as it’s primary URL again.

Earlier this week a spokesperson for The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak that the site would continue to shift to new domains (reckoning there were 70 more possibilities) until it “find one that sticks”.

It seems unlikely that the Swedish domain will be the one that fits that bill, given legal moves against it began earlier this year and the famous 2009 court battle the Bay lost in the country confirmed the file-sharing operation breaks Swedish copyright laws, but we shall see how long it manages to hold out back on its home territory.

A spokesperson for The Pirate Bay has said that the file-sharing service will continue to switch its top level domain name until it finds one “that sticks”, after moving its main web address to a new domain registry for the third time this month.

Yesterday, TPB announced that it had now moved to a new domain in Guyana, having already switched to domains registered in the Ascension Islands and Peru in the last week. Legal action by rights owners has led to various domain registries suspending Pirate Bay domains, with the Peru one going offline a few hours after TPB announced its latest shift. Prior to this month’s moves, already this year the controversial file-sharing site has used and given up on web addresses in Sweden, Greenland, Iceland and Sint Maarten.

The latest shift came after Peru’s National Institute For The Defense Of Competition And The Protection Of Intellectual Property (INDECOPI) ordered the country’s biggest ISP, Red Cientifica Peruana, to suspend the domain or face a fine of up to 666,000 soles (£145,000). Although the company has apparently complied, El Comercio reports that RCP may yet appeal against the order on the grounds that any action should be taken against the owners of the domain, rather than the company it is registered with.

Whether or not that appeal goes ahead, The Pirate Bay has already moved on regardless, and will continue to do so. Speaking to TorrentFreak after the latest change, a TPB spokesperson said: “We have some 70 domain names left, so eventually we will find one that sticks. A few domains have been prepared so we can switch over whenever’s needed”.

This is something of a shift from comments made last week, when The Pirate Bay said it was preparing an update to its PirateBrowser software which would return everything to the days of decentralised file-sharing, and thus have no need for domain names.

Of course, for those accessing the Bay via ‘proxies’ set up to circumvent ISP-level blocks against the file-sharing site in the UK and other countries, the domain name changes will already be going unnoticed, because the proxies remain and quickly update. Though, while the UK music industry has secured numerous web-blocks this year, web-blocking is still only occurring in a handful of countries, and TPB told TorrentFreak that currently only 10% of its users access the site in this way.

How many more of those 70 domain names in reserve will be used, and how many more before the end of the year, remains to be seen.

The Pirate Bay has moved to its third new domain name of the month, now located at thepiratebay.gy, registered in Guyana, it announced in a blog post this morning.

As previously reported, the file-sharing service moved to a .sx – Ascension Islands – domain last week, before quickly shifting to Peru’s .pe suffix. This follows moves from Sweden to Greenland to Iceland to Sint Maarten, in the site’s continued attempts to stay online.

It remains to be seen how long the site will remain at its new domain name, but operators of The Pirate Bay recently told TorrentFreak that they were working on a new version of their PirateBrowser software, which would mean URLs would no longer be necessary to access its servers, saying that “by their actions [the entertainment industry] finally brought on the next generation of decentralised services”.

The Pirate Bay ship has finally arrived in Peru. If only these journeys around the world were literal, that would be quite a movie. Let’s all imagine a damaged but resilient old-fashioned pirate vessel running aground on the Lima coastline, having navigated Cape Horn since its last stop-off on Ascension Island (pirates don’t get to use the Panama Canal). And crawling off the ship are the digital pirates, still standing up for freedom, for free speech, and for everyone’s God given right to free Lady Gaga MP3s. But will the Peruvians let them stay?

As previously reported, as part of ongoing efforts to shut down the Bay, the file-sharing operation that just won’t die, the entertainment industry has been putting pressure on domain registries around the world to not host the official web address of the controversial website. And with some success, the Bay being forced to move its domain from Sweden to Greenland to Iceland to Sint Maarten since the start of the year.

With the .SX domain cut off earlier this week, the Bay quickly relocated its site to a domain registered in Ascension Island in the middle of the South Atlantic. But with that island a British Overseas Territory, and therefore open to pressure from the UK entertainment industry, Bay chiefs immediately began setting up its next alternative domain. And so thepiratebay.pe has gone live. TPB operators hope that it will be much harder for European and North American movie studios and record companies to throw about their weight in South America. We’ll see I guess.

Though Team Bay have told Torrentfreak that new development work on their own PirateBrowser software – released earlier this year to help file-sharers circumvent the web-blocks internet service provides in various countries have been forced to put in place against the file-sharing site – will mean that the service no longer requires a conventional website, so that constantly disappearing domain names won’t matter.

Referring to the various anti-piracy groups of the world, a TPB spokesperson told Torrentfreak: “They should wait for our new PirateBrowser, then domains will be irrelevant. Once that is available then all links and sites will be accessible through a perfectly legal piece of browser software and the rest of it will be P2P, with no central point to attack via the legal system. By their actions [the entertainment industry] finally brought on the next generation of decentralised services”.

Of course rights owners will presumably hope that – while the enhanced PirateBrowser may make it harder to hinder the Bay’s day-to-day operations – the decentralised version of the file-sharing community will be less attractive to more casual file-sharers, making them more likely to head to legitimate online services instead. Time will tell, of course, time will tell.

So The Pirate Bay’s domain name has moved yet again, this time to Ascension Island, aka a volcano in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean.

As previously reported, the always controversial file-sharing website has had to alter its main domain a few times this year already, because each time it picks a new country in which to register its web address, the entertainment industry lobbies or litigates to have the domain suspended, because of that rampant copyright infringement thing.

Either way, the Bay has done a sneaky switch to Ascension Island’s domain registry, making the site’s primary domain thepiratebay.ac. Though as the South Atlantic island is a British Overseas Territory, meaning the UK entertainment industry will no doubt step in with immediate effect, a spokesperson for the Bay has told Torrentfreak that this is just a temporary fix while a domain is set up in Peru. Exotic.

Of course, ironically, because in the UK, and several other countries now, the official Pirate Bay domain is blocked by ISPs complying with a court order, such domain changes will go unnoticed by many file-sharers, who access the site via proxies that will stay updated. Indeed, the shift does the Bay a temporary favour, because as of this morning the ISPs were still to catch up and apply the webblock to thepiratebay.ac. And either way, the second listing on a Google search of “The Pirate Bay” is a working proxy site.

Which is why, even though the labels and movie studios will continue to demand thepiratebay domains be suspended and blocked, and proxy sites be blocked too, occasional friend Google will remain enemy number one amongst the anti-piracy brigade as 2014 dawns.

Web block injunctions are becoming common place in Europe, with the music and movie industries in various countries going to court to get orders forcing internet service providers to block access to copyright infringing websites where jurisdiction issues prevent the authorities from actually stopping piracy set ups from operating.

But a new injunction in France goes one step further by also forcing search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo! to remove the offending websites from their databases. This is a step towards tackling the ongoing issue with the web-block approach to combating online piracy, ie that post any block, proxy sites soon appear which are easily found via search engines, and which provide easy access to blocked file-sharing sites.

The search engines, of course, will remove specific links to infringing content if made aware of them under the takedown system set out in American copyright law, but so far Google et al have resisted calls by the music and film industries, who routinely argue “why can’t you just automatically block any link that begins with the domain of a known copyright infringing site like thepiratebay.se?”

A new web block injunction passed by the High Court in Paris, which names search engines as well as ISPs, seems to force the search firms to take that kind of action, with sixteen unlicensed video-streaming sites targeted. Though, of course, the injunction won’t specifically mention the proxy URLs that will now spring up for the targeted sites, which is another weakness; though a recent Belgian injunction against The Pirate Bay allowed for proxies to be added to the block list without renewed court action, and the UK web-block rulings have some flexibility in this regard to.

But reps for the web firms in the French case nevertheless argued that the web-block injunctions were unworkable because of the constant stream of new proxies that are likely to be created every time one route to unlicensed content is cut off. Following the ruling, Google said it was disappointed with the court’s verdict, and that rights owners should be utilising its rights management tools rather then pursuing web block injunctions of this kind.

But the UK’s Motion Picture Association welcomed the decision, telling reporters: “Search engines are incredibly skilful, yet they are still leading consumers to illegal money-making sites even when the searcher is seeking legal content online. The present situation is confusing for consumers, damaging the legal download market and legitimising copyright theft. The decision in France is clearly a step in [the right] direction”.

So, perhaps it’s just as well Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm is in prison, it means he has more time to focus on his ever mounting legal woes.

As previously reported, Svartholm was one of the three Pirate Bay founders prosecuted in Sweden for their role in setting up and operating the controversial file-sharing website. He went AWOL after being sentenced to a year in jail for the copyright infringement TPB enabled, and in doing so lost the right to appeal that ruling (though his fellow founders ultimately failed to overturn the judgement anyway, but did get their jail terms reduced).

Svartholm was eventually extradited back to Sweden last year after being accused of various hacking crimes, and has been in jail ever since, partly serving the TPB sentence, and partly because of the hacking charges, some though not all of which were upheld in court. He also faces separate allegations that he was involved in the hacking of servers belonging to the Danish police, and earlier this month failed in his attempts to avoid being sent to Denmark to face those charges. He is due to be extradited there this week.

And now the computer man is facing a new round of legal problems, though this time civil litigation rather than another criminal prosecution. A number of TV and film companies in Russia have filed legal proceedings in the Moscow courts against two Russian file-sharing sites, Rutor.org and Kinozal.tv. And, it transpires, Svartholm and his company are listed as owning the Rutor.org domain, so he has been listed as a key defendant in the case.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, a hearing on the Russian file-sharing cases is due to take place on 10 Dec. Svartholm is unlikely to attend, though at least this time he has a good excuse, what with the Swedish prison sentence and Danish criminal trial.

The Supreme Court in Belgium has upheld an earlier ruling that forces internet service providers in the country to put web-blocks in place against all “current and future domains” utilised by The Pirate Bay. It’s an attempt to ensure a speedier blocking of the proxies that enable web-users to circumvent the original TPB block.

The Belgian Anti-Piracy Foundation began legal action to force ISPs in the country to block access to the Bay on copyright grounds in 2011, securing an injunction against net firms Belgacom and Telenet on second attempt.

However, as with web-blocks elsewhere, including those secured by the BPI in the UK, as soon as the initial blockade was in place numerous proxies went live which allow file-sharers to still reach the often controversial TPB website. These proxies can be found via various routes, though often come high up in Google searches, so are pretty much available to all.

Rights owners can, of course, secure new injunctions against the proxy sites, but doing so can be time consuming, and by the time additional blocks are in place new proxies will have been launched. Thus, it’s a never-ending battle.

Though, while it’s a battle that ultimately can’t be won, if ISPs are obligated to block all new proxies as a matter of course, then it will make relying on proxy access to the Bay a little more irritating for users, and, for the anti-piracy brigade, every extra irritant is good news.

The BAF initially secured its web-block-plus injunction last year, though appeals and other legal-wranglings delayed things. However, with the Supreme Court ruling all appeals are exhausted and the ISPs will now be forced to act.

The exact wording of the verdict is yet to be published, but it is thought ISPs will not only have to block Pirate Bay proxies on the fly, but will be obliged to play a “proactive” role in monitoring new URLs that provide access to the site. The ruling may also apply to other popular file-sharing services such as ExtraTorrent and Kickass.to.

Sweden’s Supreme Court has refused to hear the final appeal by Pirate Bay co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm over his previously reported hacking conviction.

Svartholm, also jailed for a year for his part in establishing the copyright infringing Bay, was found guilty of various unrelated hacking charges in June. Although an appeals court reduced his sentence for the hacking crimes last month (by deeming that some of the charges against him couldn’t actually be proven), he was still left with another year of jail time.

The Bay man had hoped to appeal the charges that still stood, but Sweden’s Supreme Court don’t believe there is justification for a further hearing. Meanwhile Svartholm is also trying to fight off attempts to extradite him to Denmark to face other hacking charges that could result in a much longer jail sentence.

Last year Sweden’s Supreme Court also refused to hear the final appeal from Svartholm’s fellow Pirate Bay founders over their copyright convictions, though Svartholm himself had lost the right to even approach the highest branch of the country’s judiciary regards that case, having failed to show up for his first appeal hearing after going AWOL.

The Pirate Bay has announced that its previously reported PirateBrowser software, launched to coincide with the controversial file-sharing site’s tenth anniversary in August, has now been downloaded a million times. According to TorrentFreak, now about 0.5% of people visiting the Bay do so using the tool.

PirateBrowser is designed to circumvent the web-blocks that have been instigated in various countries, including the UK, where internet service providers are forced to stop their customers from accessing the file-sharing service via its usual domains.

As previously noted, numerous proxy sites exist to help the customers of web-blocking ISPs to still access the Bay, but PirateBrowser saves file-sharers the (very moderate) hassle of having to seek one out, by automatically routing them around any blockades.

A spokesman for the Bay told TorrentFreak: “I guess that a lot of people want to see the websites their governments and courts are trying to hide from them”.

The Italian courts have ordered that The Pirate Bay be blocked. Again. Judges in Italy first ordered internet service providers in the country to block access to the controversial file-sharing site back in 2008, and while an appeals court overturned the block, the country’s Supreme Court reinstated it in 2010.

But the always resilient Bay seemingly returned to the country via an alternative domain, which was the subject of a new web-block injunction application considered in the Bergamo court last week. And on Thursday an injunction ordering Italian ISPs to block the new Bay domain, plus other file-sharing sites 1337x.org, h33t.eu, extratorrent.com and torrenthound.com, was duly passed.

Though, of course, those who so wish can still access the Bay in Italy using one of numerous proxy sites, as UK file-sharers regularly do, even though British ISPs were ordered to block the file-sharing site last year.

So, it’s with a strange mixture of pride and despair that we announce that the second most read news story on the CMU website in September was one headlined, ‘Miley Cyrus licks hammer’. She was comfortably seen off the top spot by a report on The Pirate Bay dropping its artist promotion service The Promo Bay from its homepage. But, come on, I think we all know who the real winner is here.

After Miley, a brief report on The Dead Weather heading back into the studio takes third, the many woes of Insane Clown Posse fourth, and Michael Buble’s 2014 UK tour dates fifth. Meanwhile in sixth was speculation on what a cryptic message posted by The Killers could mean (a report apparently much more interesting that the reality, if traffic numbers are anything to go by).

Next up, a cluster of music industry stories, with the news of Muve Music founder Jeff Toig’s appointment to the role of Chief Business Officer at SoundCloud at seven, a report on Spotify’s new Connect service, which allows premium customers to stream across multiple devices and wireless speakers more easily, at eight, and OfCom’s latest piracy report at nine.

Then, rounding things off, is Celine Dion. And I don’t think there’s anything that could be added to that sentence.

The Pirate Bay co-founded jailed for two years back in June over various hacking charges has had his sentence cut in half on appeal after judges ruled that some of the hacking claims made against him couldn’t be proven.

As previously reported, Gottfrid Svartholm was the Pirate Bay founder who, after being found guilty in the Swedish courts of copyright infringement for his role in setting up the controversial file-sharing site, went missing. But he was extradited back to Sweden last year on the back of the hacking allegations, and has since been serving jail time for both his Pirate Bay involvement and the other charges.

In the hacking case Svartholm was accused of staging a data grab after hacking into the servers of services firm Logica and of making illegal cash transfers after hacking into the IT systems of Nordic bank Nordea. But the Svea Court Of Appeal this week dismissed the latter charges saying that another party could have remotely used the defendant’s computer to hack into Nordea’s servers, and that it couldn’t be proven Svartholm himself was behind the hack.

The ruling means that Svartholm will now only have to serve a one year jail term in relation to the hacking case, in addition to the year relating to the Pirate Bay conviction.

01: Pandora won one of its ASCAP legal disputes. The American collecting society said there was nothing it could do to stop key music publishers from withdrawing their ASCAP-represented song catalogues from the digital licence under which the streaming service operates. But Pandora argued that all ASCAP members were obliged to honour its current licence, that runs until 2015, and this week a US court agreed. The victory came as the sometimes controversial streaming company confirmed it would be issuing a new batch of shares in a bid to raise in the region of $279.4 million. ASCAP dispute report | Share sale report

02: Rhapsody confirmed a restructure. The US-based streaming music company, which operates under the Napster brand in Europe, confirmed it had a new shareholder in the form of Columbus Nova Technology Partners, and that two reps from that company would now sit on the Rhapsody board. Their arrival coincides with a downsizing that will affect 30 staff, and which will see President Jon Irwin and CFO Adi Dehejia stand down. CMU report | The Verge report

03: Kim Dotcom launched his litigation against New Zealand’s spy agency. A police investigation recently confirmed that the Government Communications Security Bureau breached New Zealand laws when it spied on Dotcom in 2011, ahead of the shutdown by US authorities of his MegaUpload company. However, police said the breaches hadn’t been deliberate, so no prosecutions would be pursued. But Dotcom was given court approval to sue over the breaches earlier this year, and last weekend the Mega chief confirmed he was filing a NZ$6 million lawsuit against the GCSB. CMU report | Wired report

04: AEG Live concluded its arguments in the Jackson case. The live giant had been expected to call back to the witness stand Katherine Jackson, the main plaintiff in the litigation, in which the Jackson family claims AEG Live should be held liable for the death of Michael Jackson in 2009. But instead they actually concluded their arguments with a recording of a deposition by an old doctor of the singer, who said the late king of pop had been excited if nervous about his planned ‘This Is It’ project in the months before his untimely death. He also said that the star had a habit of keeping secrets about his health issues and medical treatments, even from other doctors he was consulting. The jury are expected to begin their deliberations next week. CMU report | Billboard report

05: The Pirate Bay dropped The Promo Bay from its home page. Although The Promo Bay, the spin-off website from the controversial file-sharing service which provides a platform for new artists to promote their work, will continue, featured artists from it won’t be promoted on the TPB home page, one of the main attractions of participating in The Promo Bay to start with. The change seemingly follows the departure of Tobias Andersson, who founded The Promo Bay, from The Pirate Bay team, he having been the person who oversaw the featured artist element. He told TorrentFreak that the dropping of The Promo Bay from The Pirate Bay home page was “more evidence of the [Pirate Bay] site going stale”. CMU report | Torrentfreak report

The Pirate Bay has dropped the Promo Bay artist promotion service from the front page of its main website.

As previously reported, The Promo Bay initially began as a feature on The Pirate Bay itself, before being spun off into a separate site last year. That site will continue to run as normal, but under the original scheme the real attraction for artists to submit their work to The Promo Bay was that it might be promoted on the The Pirate Bay home page, giving them exposure to the site’s large daily audience. That is no longer an option.

The frequency with which Promo Bay acts were promoted on the The Pirate Bay home page has decreased of late, seemingly since the departure of one of the people behind The Promo Bay venture, Tobias Andersson.

Asked about the decision to now ditch his former feature by TorrentFreak, Andersson did not mince his words, saying: “The Pirate Bay not continuing with The Promo Bay is just more evidence of the site going stale. It’s not the rebellious, energetic and progressive site it once was. It’s bloated with ads, more than ever, worse than ever. Nothing is said, nothing is done”.

He added that TPB has lost the edge it once had over other file-sharing sites, saying: “It’s just another site. Which is sad since it once was something completely different. It didn’t used to be just a site, it was a concept of a better internet. Sure, most people only want the site for Hollywood movies and mainstream music. But any site could do that. There are hundreds of sites like that. I see no value in TPB continuing. The best thing would be if it shut down now, to mark ten years of resistance, resiliency and a stance for the free internet”.

I’m sure there are plenty of people reading who would agree with him. At least in part.

Usage of The Pirate Bay and other torrent sites in America has not been affected by the launch of the so called ‘six-strikes’ system in the country back in February, according to Torrentfreak.

As previously reported, the US Copyright Alert System is the result of a collaboration between America’s content industries and internet service providers, and, unlike in France and New Zealand (and in theory the UK), is not the result of legislation, but came about through a voluntary agreement.

The initiative is also less draconian than most other ‘graduated response’ systems, with up to six warning letters being sent to suspected shareholders before any action is taken, and generally undetermined final sanctions that would likely vary from ISP to ISP. After a few delays the venture went live in February, though no figures have, as yet, been published with regards how many warning letters have been issued.

Nevertheless, Torrentfreak has been reviewing Pirate Bay and torrent usage stats for the US since the system was launched, and says that there has been no drop in usage, indeed many sites, including the ever controversial Pirate Bay, are enjoying increases in traffic.

Based on figures supplied by TPB, Torrentfreak notes: “One of the first data points that stands out is the huge spike in traffic during March this year, the first full month after the Copyright Alert System started. Instead of a decline in traffic, The Pirate Bay nearly broke a record number of page views that month, only trailing behind September 2012. Compared to March 2012, the increase in page views is 31%, and compared to March 2011 this goes up to 113%”.

Conceding that that rise may have been a result of a backlash amongst prolific file-sharers to the launch of the Copyright Alert System, and that few letters would likely have been sent by that point, Torrentfreak goes on: “After the big jump during March this year there was a slight drop in traffic, but the number of page views generated by US visitors was still higher than last year”.

01: Ticketmaster President Nathan Hubbard was reported to be leaving the Live Nation-owned firm. It’s thought that the decision to ease out Hubbard, who has been a Live Nation exec since 2006 and head of Ticketmaster since 2010, was due to bosses feeling that the ticketing firm needed someone with more of a tech background at the top. Ticketmaster’s top man in North America, Jared Smith, it to move into the President role, at least in the interim. CMU report | Wall Street Journal report

02: Live firm MAMA & Company confirmed CEO Dean James was on “leave” and Chairman Richard Thompson was overseeing the running of the business. Although the reason for the switch isn’t currently clear, MAMA owners Lloyds Development Capital strongly refuted rumours that it had pushed James aside at the company he co-founded in 2005, and which he successfully led through the HMV acquisition and subsequent LDC-backed management buy-out. CMU report

03: Live Nation boss Michael Rapino sold a third of his shares in the company. The sale reportedly netted Rapino, who signed a new five year contract with the company last year, around $11.7 million, he choosing to sell as the shares hit a 52 week high. Live Nation said that the sale was for “estate-planning purposes”. CMU report | Bloomberg report

04: Sony withdrew its sponsorship of the Sony Awards after 32 years. The radio industry’s most prestigious award ceremony will for the time being be called The Radio Academy Awards while a new sponsor is found. On its decision to pull out of the ceremony, Sony said that it was now time for Sony to move on and focus on other areas of the business”. CMU report | Radio Today report

05: The Pirate Bay celebrated its tenth birthday. Despite continued attempts to shut it down, block access to it, seize its domains, imprison and fine those involved with it, The Pirate Bay remains firmly online. To mark the occasion, the site’s current operators held a party in Stockholm last weekend and launched a new web-block avoiding browser. CMU report | The Local report

In our features section this week, we interviewed the wonderful Julia Holter, and got two excellent playlists from Ghostpoet and The Axis Of Awesome’s Benny Davis.

Music, comedy and even some go-go dancers, because, well, why not, were all on show at a party held on the outskirts of Stockholm this weekend to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Pirate Bay.

And even though those who originally created the file-sharing website are no longer actively involved, either in prison or trying to stay out of prison after being found guilty of contributory copyright infringement in the Swedish criminal courts, the fact that TPB is still operational after a decade, given how many lawsuits it has lost around the world, is quite an achievement. However much the music and movie industries wish the Bay would go the way of Napster, Grokster, Limewire, et al.

Of course the content industries have successfully won web-block injunctions in various territories that force internet service providers to stop their customers from accessing the Bay; but such blocks are relatively easy to circumvent. And to mark its tenth anniversary, The Pirate Bay announced a new bit of software called the Pirate Browser that will help with that circumventing, enabling uses to find the file-sharing service and other similar sites beyond any court-ordered ISP-instigated blocks.

The people behind The Pirate Bay of today said via their blog: “It’s a simple one-click browser that circumvents censorship and blockades and makes the site instantly available and accessible”.

Topping the most popular news stories on theCMUwebsite.com in June was a report on a police visit to the home of the operator of Pirate Bay proxy PirateSniper. The police were joined by representatives of the Federation Against Copyright Theft, who pointed out that criminal charges and a jail sentence could be the result of keeping the proxy going.

Pirate Bay proxies also featured further down the top ten, at seven, with the news that Sky Broadband had begun blocking another batch of proxy sites that give people access to The Pirate Bay, which is itself blocked by the six major ISPs in the UK as a result of a 2012 court order.

And there was more file-sharing-related news at number six with what may be the final chapter in the long running story of one-time file-sharer Joel Tenenbaum and the damages claim brought against him by the Recording Industry Association Of America. An appeals court ruled that the disputed $675,000 figure he was told to pay the US record industry for sharing 31 songs on Kazaa should be upheld.

Keeping things music business-focussed down at number eight was a report on the restructuring of Metropolis Studios’ financial affairs, which saw the London studio complex put one of its companies into administration and sell its assets to a holding company, Metropolis London Music Ltd, which also took on the old company’s staff.

Near the end of our list, at number nine, was a report on claims by The Mirror that negotiations to bring Chris Moyles back to BBC Radio in a new slot had now completely stalled, after reports last year that it was unlikely that his return would be on Radio 1, as had been originally planned.

Heading back up to the top of the list, at number two was the announcement that Boards Of Canada would be streaming their new album ahead of its release, while at number three was the news that Mumford & Sons had been forced to cancel their remaining US tour dates as bassist Ted Dwane recovered from brain surgery.

At number four and five were some older stories. First a report from May on Dr Dre’s latest stint in the studio and plans to make a film about his former group, NWA. Next, going back all the way to November 2012, was a report on the possibility of a new film, called ‘Tropico’, being made by Lana Del Rey. The surge in interest for this latter story came after filming began earlier this month, which we also reported on.

The final story in our top ten is another from last November, and one we’ve seen in our most popular articles before. Yes, it’s the answer to the all-important question of what Harry Styles’ perfect girlfriend would be like.

Gottfrid Svartholm was one of three Bay founders found guilty in 2009, alongside one of their key funders, of copyright infringement for their role in creating and running the controversial file-sharing website. Unlike his fellow founders and funder, Svartholm failed to show up when the conviction reached the Swedish appeal courts, meaning his one year jail sentence for copyright crimes was fixed, and future avenues of appeal cut off.

At that point the Bay man was living in Cambodia, outside the jurisdiction of the Swedish courts, but last year he was extradited back to his home country after various other hacking allegations were made against him. He’s been in jail ever since, seemingly serving his Pirate Bay sentence while awaiting a court session to hear the hacking charges.

Although various allegations were made against Svartholm, the court case seemed to centre on alleged attacks on the servers of the Nordea banking group and services firm Logica, during which the personal data of about a thousand Swedes were taken and subsequently published online.

Svartholm and his co-defendant Mathias Gustafsson claimed that while their computers had been used in the hack attacks, the hacking had been done by other parties. But experts testifying for the prosecution claimed data found on the PCs in question suggested the defendants had done the hacking, and neither men could, or were willing to, name who the alleged third party hackers might have been.

Svartholm was jailed for two years, while Gustafsson was given a suspended sentence and told to seek psychiatric counselling. The Bay founder faces further legal woes, with the Danish authorities recently winning the right in a Swedish court to extradite him to face allegations of a separate hacking incident.

As previously reported, although his fellow Pirate Bay founders did appeal their convictions relating to the file-sharing site all the way, they were ultimately unsuccessful, though so far only funder Carl Lundstrom has also served his sentence.

01: Apple announced iTunes Radio. It’s been a long time coming, but Apple just about got enough deals in place to feel confident enough to announce at its annual developers’ conference this week that they will launch their streaming service, iTunes Radio, in the US in the autumn. As expected, it will be of the ‘interactive radio’ variety, funded by advertising and with download sell-through. The service will only be accessible via Apple devices, and will be available ad-free to iTunes Match users.

Both Sony Music and the Sony/ATV music publishing business signed up to provide content to the new streaming platform just days before the announcement, following the Warner Music labels and publishing business and the Universal Music record company. Deals will now be needed with the independents, though rumour has it a deal has been done with BMI, one of the American publishing sector collecting societies, to cover smaller BMI-affiliated publishers which aren’t doing direct deals with digital services. CMU report | Evolver FM report

02: Pandora stepped up its royalty war with the American music publishers. The US-based streaming service announced it had bought a small FM radio station in South Dakota. The acquisition was mainly a bid to join the Radio Music Licensing Committee, through which the traditional radio industry negotiates royalty rates with the American collecting societies. Pandora, which argues that the music industry always gives traditional broadcasters more favourable rates, even when they are running Pandora-competing online services, hopes to cut the royalties it pays to the music publishers by becoming part of the RMLC system.

The US publishers did not react well. One of the collecting societies, BMI, said it was ending ongoing royalty negotiations and would now go legal on the matter. Pandora is already involved in a legal battle with the other major society ASCAP. CMU report | Billboard report

03: HMV got ready to return to the high street in Ireland. Hilco, the company that brought HMV UK out of administration, confirmed it had also done deals with some of the landlords of former HMV stores in Ireland, enabling the entertainment retailer to reopen at three sites in the country. Unlike in the UK, the whole of the HMV Ireland chain shut down not long after the firm went into administration in January. The reopening Irish stores are in Dublin and Limerick, though more may follow. CMU report | Irish Independent report

04: Pirate Bay proxies were targeted in UK, as the site was blocked for first time in Ireland. Following Sky’s lead, other broadband providers in the UK started blocking access to more of the proxies that have enabled web-users to circumvent the blockade put up to stop people accessing the controversial file-sharing website, following legal action by record industry trade body the BPI. Meanwhile the operator of one proxy told Torrentfreak he had been visited by the police and the Federation Against Copyright Theft, who warned he’d be targeted with criminal action if he didn’t shut the proxy down. In Ireland the record industry secured web-blocking injunctions against the Bay for the first time, forcing an ongoing battle with the proxies there too. Targeted proxy operator report | Irish injunction report

05: Live Nation was charged over the fatal stage collapse at a Radiohead gig. The band’s drum tech Scott Johnson was killed when a scaffolding stage structure collapsed ahead of a planned concert in Canada last year. Investigators in Ontario said this week that they would charge Live Nation and its local subsidiary with four violations of the Canadian province’s Occupational Health And Safety Act. Optex Staging & Services Inc and one specific engineer will also be charged. Live Nation said “we wholeheartedly disagree with the charges brought against us by the Ministry Of Labour”, insisting no one was to blame for the tragic accident. CMU report | Billboard report

The High Court in Ireland has followed in the footsteps of its UK counterpart and ordered six internet service providers in the country to block their users from accessing The Pirate Bay, reports the Irish Independent.

As previously reported, in May last year the High Court in London issued orders requiring the six main ISPs in the UK – Sky, Everything Everywhere, TalkTalk, O2, Virgin Media and BT – to block their customers from accessing the always controversial file-sharing search service. The injunctions were pursued by record label trade body the BPI, citing precedent in a case a year earlier led by the movie industry that resulted in the blocking of Newzbin.

In Ireland, the Irish Recorded Music Association, which had already secured a voluntary commitment from the country’s leading ISP Eircom to stop its customers from accessing the Bay, began legal proceedings against all the other major net firms last December to force a block. And orders against UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb, Hutchison 3G and Telefonica O2 Ireland were issued yesterday.

Of course, anyone who really wants to access The Pirate Bay will be able to do so easily, as has been the case here too, mainly via proxies which – although they too can be blocked, as has happened with a whole batch in the UK this last week – are popping up all the time. But the content owners would argue that blocks cause a certain number of users to give up on the illegal service, and anything that makes accessing unlicensed content just a little bit more inconvenient is a step in the right direction.

The operator of a Pirate Bay proxy site has been visited by police, according to TorrentFreak, and ordered to shut down the service or face criminal action.

Pirate Bay proxies help web-users circumvent the blockades put in place by the internet service providers to stop people from accessing the controversial file-sharing website. As previously reported, the UK ISPs have been operating such blocks since being ordered to do so by the English courts after action was taken by record label trade body the BPI. At one point political group The Pirate Party operated a proxy, but chose to remove it after the BPI threatened legal action.

The operator of the PirateSniper proxy has told TorrentFreak that he was visited at his home by the police and reps of the Federation Against Copyright Theft. The FACT men did most of the talking, and said that unless he shut down his TPB proxy he could face criminal charges that could result in a jail sentence.

The legalities of running a Pirate Bay proxy are something of a grey area, as the injunctions ordering the original web-blocks are specifically targeted at the ISPs not the proxy operators, and said operators are two steps removed from the primary copyright infringement (in that they provide access to the website that provides access to the link that is then used by the infringer).

Though there would still be a case for contributory or, in English law, authorising infringement against the proxy runner, and if the rights owners could secure an injunction ordering the proxy be shutdown, and the operator ignored that injunction, then there would be a more tangible legal wrong.

In the meantime, the operator of PirateSniper – which he insists isn’t a massively utilised proxy – says he is taking legal advice, but will keep the proxy online for the time being because “we have to show companies that we will not get bullied into doing their bidding – censorship is like a cancer, we must kill it before it spreads”.

Sky Broadband began blocking another batch of Pirate Bay proxies at the weekend, according to various reports, meaning that customers of the ISP that had been accessing the controversial file-sharing platform via addresses like pirateproxy.net, fenopyreverse.info, h33tunblock.info, h33t.uk.to, kickassunblock.info, katproxy.com and movie2kproxy.com will now see a ‘no go’ alert in their browser.

As much previously reported, record label trade body the BPI successfully secured injunctions ordering the UK’s six biggest internet service providers to block access to the Bay last year. However, a plethora of ‘proxies’ soon sprung up which means that, while British web-users cannot access the file-sharing service via its official URL, they can still reach the site by using other web addresses.

Aware of this, the BPI’s injunction allows the trade body to add new proxies to a blacklist every so often, which the ISPs are then obliged to also block. The fact that Sky started blocking a whole load more proxies last weekend suggests that an update has recently been made to that blacklist, and the other British ISPs will likely follow Sky in putting the new blocks in place in the next week or so.

Of course as each set of proxies are blocked, a new bunch will go live, and anyone who really wants to access the file-sharing platform will get there, though the BPI would argue that any measures that make accessing The Pirate Bay just that little bit more tricky or time consuming are worth it in the ongoing fight against online copyright infringement.

The news story that caught the most attention on theCMUwebsite.com in May was a report on Steve Mason’s accusations that Samsung had plagiarised a video by his former group The Beta Band for a new TV advert. As Mason noted when speaking to us, such accusations are not uncommon by artists, but the story still gained a lot of interest, with additional reports by NME and Private Eye, amongst others.

At number two was perhaps a more predictably popular story – that of rapper Danny Brown receiving oral sex from a fan during a gig. Though it’s also worth reading the follow-up to this, comments from Kitty Pryde, who was the support act at the show, on exactly what happened and the aftermath both in the media and on the tour bus.

Hip hop-related stories make several appearances in this month’s top ten. Dr Dre sits at number three, with a report on his plans to get back to the studio – though apparently not to finish his long awaited ‘Detox’ album – and also to make a film about his former group, NWA. Meanwhile, at six, is the news that a judge ordered the arrest of rapper Tim Dog, despite his death being widely reported earlier this year.

Making the first of two appearances, at four is the sudden closure of London’s Cable nightclub by Network Rail – the last of three venue spaces under London Bridge Station. Coming in at number eight is a further statement from the club’s founder, saying that he’d had assurances that it wouldn’t be affected by plans to redevelop the station.

At number five is a report on apparent plans by the BPI to see a court injunction to force UK ISPs to block Grooveshark, along with a number of file-sharing websites. And speaking of file-sharing, after last month’s dance around different domains, The Pirate Bay settled in Iceland, at least for now.

Elsewhere, at number seven is the news of the cancellation of the Hop Farm festival, while coming in at number ten is a story published right at the end of the month, on Arts Council England chief Alan Davey’s claim that state funding is required in pop music to counter “failure” on the part of record labels to invest in new talent. Needless to say, those comments didn’t much please the record labels, causing him to backtrack a little the next day.

You can receive all our news stories and features in a handy email every week day with the CMU Daily. Sign up for free here.

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-ten-most-read-news-stories-on-thecmuwebsite-com-in-may-2013/feed/0Web-blocking application back in courts in Irelandhttp://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/web-blocking-application-back-in-courts-in-ireland/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/web-blocking-application-back-in-courts-in-ireland/#commentsFri, 31 May 2013 10:00:20 +0000http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/?p=81992

Efforts by the major music companies to force internet service providers in Ireland to block access to The Pirate Bay were back in court this week.

As previously reported, the majors began legal action seeking injunctions to force UPC, Imagine, Vodafone, Digiweb, Three and Telefonica O2 Ireland to stop their customers from accessing the always controversial file-sharing site late last year, citing a new bit of Irish copyright law introduced in February 2012.

The judge hearing the case last December urged all parties to reach a voluntary agreement on the matter, though that never seemed especially likely. While one of the country’s biggest ISPs, Eircom, is already voluntarily blocking TPB, it seemed unlikely its competitors, and especially UPC, would do so without a court order.

Though when, with no such voluntary agreement reached, the music majors took their application for an injunction back to court this week, none of the net firms raised strong objections to the suggestion they should block the Bay, though UPC has queried the effectiveness of any such web-blocking and the possible impact on web users’ rights.

According to the Irish Times, Judge Brian McGovern said he would now consider submissions from all parties and make a ruling as soon as possible.

Of course all such web-blocks are pretty easy to circumvent if you want to. In the UK access to The Pirate Bay is already blocked via court order, and last week new blocks were instigated against Movie2K and Download4All after action by the film industry. But one guy who has set up proxies to help users get round any blockades told Radio 1 that such moves by the music and movie industries were pointless.

He told the BBC station: “In such an interconnected world, blocking and censoring websites is a wasteful venture. There are so many workarounds available that it makes me wonder what the point is of such a block in the first place. The proxy sites I have set up make it much easier to bypass these blocks. And setting up a proxy site is really simple as well. Hundreds of people around the world have set up proxy sites for The Pirate Bay alone”.

Of course the rights owning companies would likely argue that, while of course it’s easy to circumvent web-blocks if you want to, the existence of the blockades helps educate users about which sites infringe copyright and which are legit and legal to use.

The most high profile of The Pirate Bay’s founders, Peter Sunde, formerly the official spokesperson for the controversial file-sharing website, hopes to stand in next year’s European Parliament elections, running for the Finnish Pirate Party.

It is in the European elections where The Pirate Party has generally enjoyed the most success, especially in Sweden, the home of The Pirate Bay, which isn’t officially allied with the political movement, but is routinely linked with it. Though Sunde, who seemingly has joint Swedish and Finnish nationality, will seek to stand for the pirates in Finland.

Though, of course, Sunde still faces the prospect of being jailed in relation to his conviction for copyright infringement that stemmed from his time co-running TPB. Although he has in theory exhausted all routes of appeal against that conviction through the Swedish courts, neither Sunde nor his fellow Bay-founder Fredrik Neij have done any prison time as yet.

01: The Jacksons v AEG Live court case kicked off. The Jackson family reckons AEG should be liable for the death of Michael Jackson, because it hired the doctor whose negligence caused the late king of pop’s death in 2009. But AEG says that while it may have paid Dr Conrad Murray’s bills, it didn’t hire or manager the medic. Although there have so far been few big revelations in the case – with most of the testimonies so far being repeat runs from Murray’s earlier criminal trial – it is clear both sides in this dispute are willing to be brutal to win their argument.

The Jacksons are trying hard to portray AEG’s bosses as ruthless businessmen who deliberately turned a blind eye to Jackson’s ailing health and drug issues, and Murray’s acute financial problems, to plough ahead with the ambitious ‘This Is It’ live show project. AEG, meanwhile, is prepared to discuss in detail Jackson’s longtime prescription drug use, and the lengths he went to in order to hide his drug dependencies from his friends, associates and even his doctors. The case could run for up to three months, with an all-star witness list promised down the line. CMU report | CNN report

02: The Pirate Bay moved its domain twice. Aware that its Swedish domain was in danger of being seized by the courts, and having had its attempts to use the Greenland top level domain blocked, the controversial file-sharing site announced that it would make an Icelandic address its primary URL. And Iceland’s domain authority assured TorrentFreak it wouldn’t block thepiratebay.is unless told to do so by the Icelandic courts, which would at least take some time to occur even if the content industries pursued such a court order.

But then the Swedish music industry included the Icelandic domain in its URL seizing injunction application, arguing that because thepiratebay.is is registered to a Swedish citizen, Sweden’s courts should have jurisdiction. That argument is not in anyway assured to work, but just in case it does, the Bay immediately announced it was switching domains again, to the Caribbean island of Sint Maarten. And so far that hasn’t blocked. CMU report | TorrentFreak report

03: AOL Music was wound down. Although the AOL Radio service will seemingly remain, most of the web firm’s US-based music websites and services have been axed, including the long-time running Spinner website. It was via a subsequently deleted tweet from the Spinner team that the world found out about the shutdown – “Hey guys. Just found out from AOL that we’re shutting down. Today is our last day. Seriously”. AOL’s UK-based music services had already gone offline in 2011. CMU report | The Verge report

04: Jessie J settled with her former manager Raymond Stevenson, in a deal The Sun reckoned was worth £1 million. Stevenson ‘discovered’ J while she was still at the BRIT School, and secured the singer her first albeit unsuccessful record deal. Crucially, said Stevenson, it was during this time that J developed her style and personality that then proved so profitable once he had been pushed out of the picture and she had signed to Universal. The two sides in the dispute confirmed a settlement had been reached, but said no more. Though Stevenson’s company added: “141a is very proud of Jessie’s achievements – she is a very talented artist”. CMU report | The Sun report

05: There were further developments in Universal’s digital royalties dispute. Rob Zombie, the estate of Rick James and others are suing the mega-major for a higher cut of digital royalties, citing a precedent set in the FBT v Universal court case. They want to make their lawsuit a class action, so any Universal artist with a pre-iTunes contract could claim a higher digital pay out if the litigation prevailed. The major argues that the case doesn’t qualify for class action status. In a bid to bolster their claim the plaintiffs want access to accounts relating to Universal artists’ digital earnings, a data share that would violate all kinds of confidentially agreements said the major. But only the lawyers involved in the case would see the data, responded the plaintiffs. But there are 50 of them, and they all work in the music business, Universal countered. Some poor judge will now have to rule on all this. CMU report | Billboard report

Last month’s most popular articles were dominated by updates in the long running sagas of HMV and The Pirate Bay.

However, most popular on theCMUwebsite.com in April was our report on the Yeah Yeah Yeahs banning (or at least strongly opposing) fans from taking photos during a show in New York. Debate raged hard, but in the end the people supporting the band’s decision far outweighed those who felt they should be able to take pictures and video as they place. So maybe stop it now, yeah? Yeah, yeah.

After that, the second and third positions were occupied by two recent top level domain name changes for The Pirate Bay. First was the shift from its .se URL (currently at risk of being seized by the Swedish courts) to a shiny new .gl one in Greenland. However, that new domain name was blocked by after the Denmark-affiliated country’s domain authority cited a Danish court ruling that deemed The Pirate Bay liable for the copyright infringement it enables.

Next we move onto our first HMV story. Now, I know I shouldn’t question what our readers are interested in, but a lot of you seem pretty impressed by HTML. In 2013. OK, there’s a little more to it than that, and I suppose it is quite nice. Relaunching the HMV website after being saved from administration, the company hid a little message in the site’s source code.

Meanwhile the actual announcement of Hilco’s deal to purchase the HMV UK business is down at number ten, and the other post-acquisition report that 400 jobs would be culled under the new management sits at number six.

Sandwiched between two HMV stories at number five was our report on the cancellation of the Tokyo Rocks festival, which its organiser has since promised will be rescheduled later this year. At number seven was the news of the first of a number of cancellations on Meatloaf’s UK farewell tour, ahead of the two men accused of plotting to kill Joss Stone being found guilty at eight and Will.i.am being accused of stealing other people’s music and passing it off as his own at nine.

So, that didn’t last very long at all, did it? Always controversial file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has shifted its primary domain to the island of Sint Maarten just days after moving to an Icelandic TLD, and after its very brief recent dalliance with a Greenland-registered web address last month. But yes, that does now mean the Swedish-based file-sharing enablers are the pirates of the Caribbean. Not sure why they didn’t go that route before.

As previously reported, The Pirate Bay, which has been using a Swedish .se domain for its main web address for over a year now, started looking for alternatives when it got wind of the fact efforts were being made to have that web address seized, in much the same way the US authorities took control of the MegaUpload.com domain when shutting down that controversial file-transfer platform.

Bay operators initially announced they would use a .gl domain registered in Greenland instead, but then that address was blocked almost immediately, with the Denmark-affiliated country’s domain authority citing a Danish court ruling that deemed The Pirate Bay liable for the copyright infringement it enables.

Then earlier this week TPB shifted to an Icelandic web address, with the domain authority there saying that it wouldn’t make any moves to block the new URL unless a court told it to do so. It was assumed that such a block would require the content industries who dislike the Bay so much to take new legal action through the Icelandic court system, which would be time consuming if nothing else, allowing thepiratebay.is to motor along in the meantime.

But then yesterday the anticipated legal action against the Swedish TPB domain reached court, and the lawyers handling the case sneakily included the newly promoted thepiratebay.is URL in their injunction application too. Their argument is that because the Icelandic domain is registered in the name of TPB co-founder Fredrik Neij, a Swedish national, the courts in Sweden have jurisdiction.

Whether that argument would stand up in the Swedish courts, and whether the Icelandic domain authority would feel obliged to act on an injunction originating in Sweden, isn’t at all clear (a rep for the Icelandic registry suspected not when asked by TorrentFreak). However, the Bay has pre-empted any legal debate on that issue by announcing that its main domain would now be .sx, the top level domain for Sint Maarten, the half of the Caribbean island of Saint Martin the belongs to the Netherlands.

It remains to be seen how the Sint Maarten domain authority now responds; the content industries are sure to quickly cite precedent in the Dutch courts re the Bay’s operations. Perhaps The Pirate Bay could just operate a New Domain Of The Day promotion, which could last seven or eight months when all overseas territories with their own top level domains are taken into account.

So, how about Iceland as the host of the main Pirate Bay domain? Well, why not? According to TorrentFreak, the always controversial file-sharing website has moved its top level domain to the Nordic country, because it reckons the chances of the web address being seized by the authorities there are currently relatively low.

As previously reported, shortly after the US authorities shut-down MegaUpload in January 2012, The Pirate Bay announced it was shifting its operations from its .org domain to a .se address, registered it the site’s home country Sweden, to keep the URL out of the reach of the Americans. But then earlier this month concerns were raised that the Swedish authorities might swoop to take the Bay’s domain name off them.

Pre-empting that move, TPB moved its primary domain to Greenland. For about two days. Because the domain registry there quickly blocked the new Pirate Bay address, citing a court ruling against the file-sharing operation in the Danish courts (Greenland being a self-governing province of Denmark).

But it seems that nothing about The Pirate Bay’s operations specifically violates terms and conditions set out by the Icelandic domain authority ISNIC, and it has said that it won’t take any action to stop thepiratebay.is working unless specifically ordered to do so by the Icelandic courts. Which would presumably require the content industries to launch a new bit of litigation, which would be costly and time consuming. Hence why the Bay thinks it will be safe with its new .is domain for the foreseeable.

Of course in some countries, like the UK, direct access to The Pirate Bay is blocked by most internet service providers at the order of the courts. Which means that Bay users rely on proxies that circumvent the blockades, and providing those stay up to date with any movements in TPB’s TLDs and IP addresses, then none of this will have much of an impact on said users.

Pirate Bay founder Gottfrid Svartholm has been charged with aggravated fraud, attempted aggravated fraud, and being an accomplice to attempted aggravated fraud, over allegations he was involved in the hacking of computer systems of various Swedish state agencies, as well as making an illegal online money transfer.

As previously reported, Svartholm, one of the men convicted for criminal copyright infringement in Sweden for his role in setting up the Bay, was extradited from Cambodia last year and incarcerated on return to his home country. He had previously failed to attend appeal hearings in relation to his Pirate Bay conviction, so that his one year prison sentence stemming from that charge stood.

However, it always seemed that the extradition and resulting imprisonment of Svartholm really related to other hacking allegations, even though until know it’s not been especially clear exactly what he was accused of.

Confirming charges had now been pressed, prosecutor Henrik Olin told The Local: “A large amount of data from companies and agencies was taken during the hack, including a large amount of personal data, such as personal identity numbers of people with protected identities. I’d say that Svartholm is the main person and brains behind the hacker attack”.

01: The Official Charts Company confirmed over a billion single track downloadshave been sold in the UK since it started documenting such things in 2004. Which is quite a lot. “The explosion in download sales over the past nine years means we are genuinely now living in the digital music age – with Adele as our queen!” said OCC boss Martin Talbot, the latter clause because Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’ is the most downloaded of all the tracks in the download-o-sphere. And talking of Adele… CMU report | OCC infographic

02: Adele topped the list of young musical millionaires, published this week ahead of the launch of the latest Sunday Times Rich List. The broadsheet reckons Adele is now worth in the region of £30 million. She tops a young musical rich list dominated by female artists, with Cherly Cole, Leona Lewis, Katie Melua and Florence Welch also appearing. The poor 1D boys had to make do with spots at the bottom of the Top 20 list, being worth a mere £5 million each. Though in the over-all British rock rich list it’s the old men that dominate, Paul McCartney at the top with the £680 million fortune he shares with wife Nancy Shevell. CMU report | Guardian report

03: Universal announced a deal with Roc Nation. The deal sees Jay-Z working again with his former label and employer, with Universal handling major releases from artists signed to or managed by the rapper’s JV business with Live Nation. The new alliance will include the distribution of Jay-Z’s own new record, and also means Universal will continue to handle the annual album release from Roc Nation-managed Rihanna. CMU report | Wall Street Journal report

04: The Pirate Bay moved to Greenland, briefly. Well, it officially switched its main domain name from being the Swedish-based thepiratebay.se to one using the Greenland top level domain, so thepiratebay.gl. The move came amidst fears the authorities in Sweden were plotting to seize the controversial file-sharing site’s Swedish domain. But within a day of announcing the move, the company that oversees the .gl TLD had blocked the new URL on the grounds TPB would use it for illegal operations. So the Bay is back with its .se address for the time being. CMU report | Torrent freak report

05: The IFPI published its annual stats report. Most of what was contained in the global record industry trade body’s big book of stats we already knew: the global recorded music market grew very slightly last year for the first time since the 1990s, digital is booming and streaming services are increasingly important, though CDs still generate more cash overall. Emerging markets like Brazil, India and Mexico are also contributing to the perceived record industry recovery, the report confirmed. The actual size of that recovery was amended ever so slightly downwards between the publication of the IFPI’s Digital Music Report in February and the main stats document this week, from 0.3% to 0.2%, which doesn’t sound like much, but probably represents in the region of $1.5 million. CMU report | Billboard report

The Pirate Bay’s plans to prepare for an anticipated seizure of its .se domain in Sweden by making the site’s official address ThePirateBay.gl – utilising Greenland’s top level domain – have been scuppered after the company that oversees the .gl TLD said it would block the URL.

According to TorrentFreak, Tele-Post, the company that oversees the Greeland domain suffix, said it had decided to block ThePirateBay.gl after deciding the URL would be used for illegal purposes. That decision was mainly based, it seems, on a ruling in legal action against the controversial file-sharing website in the Danish courts, Greenland being a self-governing province of Denmark.

The Bay’s Swedish domains still seem active at the moment, so the file-sharing site will seemingly move back to those for the time being, though a switch to another alternative in the near future is likely. The original ThePirateBay.org domain was dropped early last year amidst fears the US authorities might seize it.

The Pirate Bay has changed its web address, dumping its Swedish top level domain for one using Greenland’s .gl suffix. According to Torrentfreak, the change has been made in anticipation of a possible move by the Swedish authorities to seize the thepiratebay.se URL.

The controversial file-sharing service switched from its traditional .org domain to .se early last year following the shut-down of MegaUpload by the US authorities, fearing that its American registered domain could be seized by the powers that be there.

Of course for most Pirate Bay users the change will hardly be noticeable, especially those living in countries where ISPs block the file-sharing site’s official domain anyway. Though it may require rights owners to issue new takedown requests to Google for specific Pirate Bay URLs linking to copyright infringing content that pop up in the search engine. Fun times.

01: AEG was taken off the market. The venue operator and tour promoter had been up for sale since last year, though recent reports said that bids were coming in somewhat below what current owner Anschutz Inc had hoped for, mainly because of its insistence one buyer take on the whole of the AEG business. The live entertainment company will now remain part of the Anschutz company, with its top man Philip Anschutz playing a more active role moving forward. Meanwhile, in a surprise move, AEG CEO Tim Leiweke will depart the company, with CFO Dan Beckerman taking on most of his responsibilities. CMU report | FT report

02: The Madison Square Garden Company sold its Live Nation shares, which amounted to about 2% of the company. The sale follows the recent departure from the live giant’s board of James Dolan, Exec Chairman of MSG and a close ally of Irving Azoff, the former co-boss of Live Nation who exited the firm at the end of 2012. Meanwhile the live group also this week announced the appointment of Gregory B Maffei, CEO of the company’s biggest shareholder Liberty Media, to the role of Chairman, formally taking over that element of Azoff’s former job (though Maffei won’t have any of Azoff’s former executive responsibilities). CMU report | Bloomberg report

03: ASDA was mooted as a late bidder for HMV. And not just to take over the flagging entertainment retailer’s shops to turn them into convenience stores, but to actually operate an albeit streamlined network of HMV outlets, and maybe launch some HMV-branded departments in its supermarkets. To date HMV administrator Deloitte has been mainly speaking to one bidder for the actual HMV brand, Hilco, the restructuring company that already owns HMV Canada and which bought up most of the UK company’s debts once it went into administration in January. No official comments from anyone on all this, though we are expecting an announcement before the big March rent day hits. CMU report | Sun report

04: Two Pirate Bay founders had their human rights case thrown out of court. Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij had both hoped to fight their Swedish convictions for mass copyright infringement (by being original operators of the Bay) through the European Courts Of Human Rights on free speech grounds. But judges at the ECHR said that the Swedish court ruling against Sunde and Neij was about “protecting the rights of others” and therefore the two men’s subsequent claim to overthrow that judgement on human rights grounds was “manifestly ill-founded”. In theory it means that Sunde and Neij must now serve the prison sentences that were handed down as part of the Swedish ruling. CMU report | SPIN report

05: Global proposed selling three radio stations to get the OK for its Smooth/Real deal. The radio firm stressed that it didn’t agree with the UK Competition Commission’s preliminary report last month that said Global acquiring the Smooth and Real radio networks would negatively impact on the local advertising market in most regions, adding that it has research to back its argument. However, Global said in a submission, if remedies were required to win the all-clear for the Smooth/Real takeover, then it would propose selling the two Real XS stations in Manchester and Glasgow, and its own Gold station in the East Midlands. A Commission ruling is expected in May. CMU report | Guardian report

The man who staged an audacious bid to buy The Pirate Bay shortly after its founders had been found guilty of copyright infringement crimes in 2009 has been himself found guilty of misleading investors regards the financing of the planned Bay acquisition, though other charges that he lied to falsely inflate the share-price of his company were rejected in court.

As previously reported, ambitious plans by Hans Pandeya and his company Global Gaming Factory to buy the controversial file-sharing platform and make it legit grabbed headlines in 2009, but the takeover bid soon fizzled out amidst widespread doubts regards the buyer’s ability to pay the mooted multi-million dollar asking price and the soundness of his plan to turn the Bay into a commercially viable legal business.

The takeover fell off the agenda, the Bay’s operators subsequently said they had no plans to sell, and last year GGF went under. But not before Swedish prosecutors made formal allegations against Pandeya to the effect that he manufactured the Pirate Bay acquisition plan simply to rally the share price of his flagging business in what prosecutors called a “gross swindle”.

The case against the former GGF chief has recently been going through the motions in Sweden, with one time Grokster owner Wayne Rosso and Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning both reportedly testifying, having had business dealings with Pandeya regarding his TPB plans.

Judges considered the matter this week and, according to Torrentfreak, threw out most of the charges against Pandeya, though did rule that he broke Swedish company law by misleading investors regarding the financing of the planned Bay acquisition. The businessman was given a seven month suspended sentences and ordered to complete 180 hours community service.

Speaking to Torrentfreak, Pandeya’s lawyer said: “We won almost everything. The only thing which the court thought was wrong was that Pandeya stated too early that the financing was in place. But that was regarded as a minor mistake and one of the judges wanted to acquit Pandeya from that too. It is important to state that the court did not believe the testimonies from John Fanning [sic] and Wayne Rosso”.

Two of The Pirate Bay’s founders, Peter Sunde and Fredrik Neij, have had their attempt to refer their convictions for copyright infringement to the European Court Of Human Rights rejected.

As much previously reported, Sunde and Neij were two of four men prosecuted in Sweden over their involvement in the file-sharing service. All four were found guilty in a combined criminal and civil case in 2009, and a subsequent appeal failed in 2010. The Swedish Supreme Court then refused to hear the case last year, meaning the prison sentences handed down by the lower courts stood.

The Bay’s main funder, Carl Lundström, was able to serve his time under house arrest, while co-founder Gottfrid Svartholm, who left Sweden after the original trial and didn’t show up for his original appeal hearing, is now in a Swedish jail after being deported back to his home country from Cambodia last September. But Sunde and Neij continued to attempt to avoid jail.

Sunde appealed for clemency from the Swedish authorities and asked for a retrial, again questioning the case against him, while also citing health issues and his new business venture Flattr as reasons why his prison sentence should be quashed. But in November the Swedish Supreme Court rejected his application, at which point he joined Neij in attempting to have his conviction overturned at a European level on freedom of speech grounds.

Today the European Court Of Human Rights rejected the two men’s application to have their case heard, with no option to appeal the decision. In its ruling, the court said that “the convictions and damages awarded [by the Swedish courts] pursued the legitimate aim of ‘protection of rights of others’ and ‘prevention of crime’”.

It concluded: “The application must be rejected as manifestly ill-founded. For these reasons the court unanimously declares the application inadmissible”.

With all avenues seemingly exhausted, presumably the Swedish authorities will now try to enforce Sunde and Neij’s sentences. Neither of the men, nor the authorities, have formally commented, though Peter Sunde tweeted: “ECHR denied appeal for me. One judge in ECHR was also the one that ratified [anti-piracy directive] IPRED as legal in Sweden… small world? Coincidence?”

In an interesting side story to the long-running and often bizarre Pirate Bay saga, The Verge last week reported that a court ruling is pending on the 2009 bid by a Swedish company called Global Gaming Factory to buy the controversial file-sharing platform.

As you might just recall, following the first trial of The Pirate Bay’s founders and funder in the Swedish courts in 2009, GGF suddenly arrived on the scene with an audacious plan to buy the file-sharing company. In bold statements, GGF and its top man Hans Pandeya said they were buying the Bay in a multi-million dollar deal, with plans to take the company legit and a curious business model that would see users swap bandwidth for content.

Despite being initially spun as a done deal, the GGF/Bay alliance soon started to untangle amidst doubts about the buyer’s ability to pay the mooted asking price, let alone settle with the music and movie studios already out for massive damages. Questions then started to be asked about the proposed business model, and pretty much every other aspect of the acquisition. Over time talk of the purchase went quiet, and when the following year GGF suggested a new deal was now in development, reps for the Bay denied any sale was now on the agenda.

Since then Pandeya has seemingly been accused of a “gross swindle” regarding the statements he made about his Pirate Bay plans, with allegations that he announced the deal simply to capitalise on media interest in the file-sharing site at that time, in a bid to rally the share-price of his own company, a plan which initially worked. According to The Verge, Swedish prosecutors are now pursuing the GGF man over allegations he “provided misleading information to affect the price of [GGF’s] shares in press releases”.

Various witnesses have seemingly been called to testify as part of the investigation, including larger than life file-sharing veteran Wayne Ross, the man behind the early P2P service Grokster, who was briefly hired by Pandeya to work on the plan to buy and legitimise The Pirate Bay. He told Swedish authorities he quit after just a few weeks working for GGF because of doubts about claims Pandeya had made regarding his financial position. According to The Verge, a court ruling on the affair could come this week.

The people currently running The Pirate Bay last week confirmed that an earlier announcement, that the set-up would be taking up an offer to host the site in North Korea after legal pressure forced the Swedish Pirate Party to withdraw net services, was a hoax.

As expected, the announcement – and an accompanying IT trick to make it look like the Bay was now being hosted in North Korea to people who made just a cursory check – was designed to make a political point. Bay supporters equate the copyright enforcement of Western entertainment companies with censorship, hence the lark of pretending that in order to battle that action the Bay was having to rely on the North Korean regime, known in the West as one of the world’s most prolific censors.

Reports circulated yesterday that The Pirate Bay had shifted its operations to servers in North Korea, which would make for yet another bizarre chapter in the long story of the ever-resilient file-sharing platform.

Based on a recent post made by the Bay’s anonymous operators, the suggestion was that – after the Swedish Pirate Party was forced to stop offering web services to the controversial file-sharing site because of legal threats from the country’s copyright industries – the site had taken up an offer from the controversial North Korean regime to host the service at the heart of the George Bush’s axis of evil.

But analysis by The Next Web suggests that is not actually so, and revelations about an official offer to host the Bay in North Korea – which may or may not have been genuine – were probably more attempts by the site’s operators, who believe copyright enforcers breach freedom of speech, to show up Western governments, who, Bay-supporters might argue, are contradictory in being both pro-free speech and pro-strong-copyright.

As previously reported, Pirate Party organisations in Norway and Spain are thought to have stepped in to provide the web services their counterpart in Sweden now feels unable to offer for legal reasons. Quite who offers what web and hosting services to the Bay, and where, actually remains a little ambiguous, for obvious reasons.

February’s most-read news story actually dates back to December, when Peter Hook spoke to Xfm about him and Joy Division drummer Stephen Morris being questioned as potential suspects in the Yorkshire Ripper case way back in 1979, due to the band’s touring schedule being similar to the serial killers’ movements.

The sudden resurgence of the story related to an online discussion which was fairly equally split between people speculating about who the killer might actually have been (probably a fan of the band, most guessed) and people pointing out that Peter Sutcliffe confessed and was convicted of being behind the series of murders in 1981. Oh, the internet.

Legal stories also take up the number two and three slots in the top ten. Interest in Lostprophets frontman Ian Watkins’ charges for various sexual offences, including child abuse, remained high, with two CMU stories on the case appearing in the top ten again – the second at number five. At number three is The Pirate Bay’s threat to sue Finnish anti-piracy organisation CIAPC for copyright infringement.

Completing the top five, at number four, is our report from last September confirming long-time EMI Music Publishing man Jon Platt’s move to Warner/Chappell. Following that appointment, in February his long time associates Jay-Z and Beyonce followed him over to Warner’s publishing company, generating much fan interest into who exactly this Platt man was.

Positions six and seven are taken up by the returns of some high profile artists. First, Radiohead with the news that they had begun work on new material at Jack White’s studio, and at seven Prince with some actual new music.

Finally, coming in at number ten, is the news of a very exciting new service launched by Ninja Tune, helping music fans to get hold of out of print vinyl without breaking the bank. With various indie labels on board already, Beat Delete collects pre-orders for records, only taking payments once interest has passed a pre-set threshold making it worth the label’s while to do the repress.

You can receive all our news stories and features in a handy email every week day with the CMU Daily. Sign up for free here.

]]>http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-ten-most-read-news-stories-on-thecmuwebsite-com-in-february-2013/feed/0The CMU Podcast – March 2013http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-cmu-podcast-march-2013/
http://www.completemusicupdate.com/article/the-cmu-podcast-march-2013/#commentsThu, 28 Feb 2013 10:05:12 +0000http://www.thecmuwebsite.com/?p=71185This month’s CMU podcast sees CMU’s Chris Cooke and Andy Malt as ever discussing some of the biggest (and funniest) news stories from the last month in music, including the sale of the Parlophone Label Group to Warner Music, the continued downsizing of HMV, The Pirate Bay threatening to sue over copyright infringement, and MC Harvey’s ‘relationship’ with ‘Cheryl Cole’.

Get the CMU Podcast each month by signing up via iTunes, RSS, Mixcloud, or Stitcher, and listen to the latest edition via SoundCloud here:

Sweden’s Pirate Party has stopped providing bandwidth to the infamous Pirate Bay, after the previously reported threats by a Swedish organisation calling itself the Rights Alliance which threatened to sue the political party for aiding the Bay, which has been judged liable for copyright infringement in many jurisdictions, and in the Swedish courts via the conviction of three of TPB’s founders and their original funder.

However, the net services Sweden’s Pirate Party has been providing to the Bay, which actually hosts much of its online operations in a secret location, will now be offered by Pirate Party organisations in Norway and Spain. Confirming the shift, which hasn’t had any noticeable effect on the Bay’s operations, a rep for the controversial file-sharing site told TorrentFreak: “It will be interesting to see who is now blamed for hosting TPB. In the end, maybe the anti-interneterians will understand that they can’t win a fight when they have the people against them”.

01: IMPALA and Merlin announced a deal with Warner regarding PLG. The pan-European indie labels trade body and indie label digital rights agency announced an agreement with Warner Music which will see the major allow independents to “buy, license or distribute” some of the former EMI assets it is in the process of acquiring from Universal. Warner was confirmed earlier this month as the buyer of the Parlophone Label Group, which includes most of the European EMI assets Universal was forced to sell by regulators when it acquired the wider EMI recorded music business last year. Warner’s PLG deal will have to approved by European regulators too though, but as part of this week’s agreement the indie label community has pledged to not oppose that acquisition. Quite how the Warner/indies arrangement – which could as yet prove controversial – will actually work is not yet clear, but IMPALA and Merlin said it would “bring more scale into the independent sector”. CMU report | FT report

02: HMV announced more store closures. 37 more branches of the flagging retailer will shut in the next month or so, in addition to the 66 UK stores and sixteen Irish outlets already closed or set for closure. The boss of the Entertainment Retailers Association, Kim Bayley, had already predicted more closures, but told the BBC “everyone in the industry hopes that they come through the other side, and that with a slimmer and leaner organisation HMV can still make a high street presence work”. CMU report | Sky News report

03: The Met called for more efforts to crack down on ticket crime. The London police force published a report on ticket fraud on the back of its efforts to combat the dodgy distribution of tickets to last year’s Olympics. The report said that the live industry should work with search engine operators to ensure legit ticket sellers score higher than fraudsters in web searches, and encouraged consumers to report any incidents of ticket fraud so the authorities could better ascertain the extent of the problem, which could be costing punters and the live sector up to £40 million a year. CMU report | Radio 1 report

04: The RIAA said Google should do more to stop illegal sites appearing in search results. The US record industry trade body said it had assessed the impact of a change in the Google search algorithm made last year, which was meant to downgrade unlicensed sources of music in Google search results, but had found the tweak had had little effect, and illegal music still appeared too high in Google search lists. The trade body wants the web giant to do more in this domain. Google, though, according to reports, is currently focusing on stopping pirates from using its ad networks. CMU report | C-Net report

05: The Pirate Bay squabbled with Finnish anti-piracy group CIAPC. The controversial file-sharing website cried foul last week when CIAPC launched an anti-piracy website that spoofed its site, accusing the pro-copyright body of infringing the Bay’s copyrights by lifting a bunch of code off the actual Pirate Bay to create the parody. The Bay threatened to sue, but CIAPC said it would welcome any legal challenge, because it would force TPB’s anonymous operators to reveal themselves. So far Team Bay are yet to actually sue, though reports suggest they have reported CIAPC to the police for copyright violation. Remains to be seen if police get involved in what would usually be handled by a civil action. CMU report | Register report

An alliance of Swedish rights owners have reportedly written to the country’s Pirate Party demanding it stop providing internet access to the infamous Pirate Bay, threatening legal action if the political organisation fails to comply. A Swedish net firm called Serious Tubes Networks has also been sent a missive, according to The Local.

There have been various efforts over the years by the Swedish authorities, pressured by the music and movie industries and empowered by various court decisions, to take TPB offline, in much the same way the US authorities shut down MegaUpload last year.

However, it’s never quite clear how and where the rogue file-sharing site is hosted, and on the one occasion some key servers were seized, operators of the site got it back up and running on new kit within a couple of days.

Of course unlike MegaUpload, which actually hosted unlicensed music and movie files, TPB’s databases simply identify the whereabouts of content files elsewhere on the net, making the site itself much more nimble, especially since the shift from storing BitTorrent files to magnet links.

Nevertheless, it is believed The Pirate Party provides some web services to the Bay, and Sara Lindbäck of Sweden’s Rights Alliance says “if they don’t stop, we will have to go to court”.

According to The Local, the Alliance believes that the decision a year ago by the Swedish Supreme Court to not hear the appeals of the four men convicted for their involvement in founding or funding the Bay, piles on the pressure for anyone assisting with the current operations of the file-sharing set up. Indeed, says the Alliance, hosting The Pirate Bay constitutes a “criminal act”.

The rights group has give the Pirate Party and Serious Tubes until 26 Feb to respond to the letters. But the head of the Swedish Pirate Party disagrees with the Alliance’s viewpoint, telling reporters: “The Pirate Party’s activity is legal, and lawful activities should not be subjected to threats of this type. It is not illegal to provide The Pirate Bay with internet access”.